Nightshift
by cagd
Summary: In need of quick cash, and despite his own personal policy of never doing anything that involves an honest night's work or rainbow punch, Spike takes on a night job.
1. Help Wanted

"What I'm saying, is, if you don't have a paid staff member in the building at night, you're not only violating company policy, but you risk losing all of your liability insurance, " Jacob Raus, a balding little man in a fussy grey flannel suit carrying a briefcase paused as they clattered down the back hallway towards the loading dock that opened into the alley, "You could lose everything, and we wouldn't want that, would we now, Mr. Henry?"

"But I can't keep night staff. Everybody I've ever hired, even temps, don't last more than a night or two. Some of them even walk off the job before the shift ends – without even bothering to clock out first!" Mr. Henry pulled out a set of keys from his grease-stained jacket pocket, "If I can just have a warm body, somebody with a pulse, on night shift until the end of the month, I'll be in the clear!" He shoved a key into the lock of the back door beside the bigger door that led out onto the loading dock, turned it, and pushed open the dented steel door, upon which somebody had sloppily scrawled in Sharpie, "Carlton smells like feet!" at about knee height.

The "C" was backwards.

"Feet" was spelled with an "ea", but anybody reading got the gist right away.

Anyway…

There was a bit of resistance followed by a thud and an "Oof, bloody 'ell!" when the head-mechanic and part owner of Sunnydale's newest kiddie theme restaurant gave a bit of a shove as the door suddenly opened into the dumpster smelling alley which led to "Parts and Service".

"Even someone from the downtown Sunnydale homeless shelter, if they're not too dirty or crazy, will do, Mr. Henry. All you need is a warm body and you won't be violating the terms of your company's liability insurance – just five nights until your current policy expires, and then the new policy will kick in — you'll be home free!" the company's in-house lawyer gestured, "Just five nights, is all!"

"Right." Mr. Henry sighed, hands in pockets as he stood on the edge of the loading dock staring moodily out towards the street at the end of the shadowy alley, waiting for the parts truck from corporate to arrive, "Five nights, a warm body, and the new policy … are you sure that's all it'll take? Things have been shaky since that "little" incident last month got into the newspapers. Customers are planning their kid's parties without us, and investors are dropping us like hot potatoes."

"I assure you, as a representative for the law firm of Wolfrum & Hart, this _will_ blow over." Raus paused in mid-glasses polish, "We represented the White Star Line after the Titanic incident in 1912, and presided over their liquidation in 1932, what can possibly go wrong?"

"I don't like it, but what choice do I have?" Mr. Henry noticed a young man, maybe early twenties, with what looked like bleached hair picking himself up off the ground at the end of the loading dock, a drop of about six feet, "Hey, kid, need a job?"


	2. Negative Cash Flow Issues

Back in the bad old days, William may have been an excruciatingly painful bore, what with the unreadable poetry and getting snubbed by girls at parties and all, but he at least had one good idea.

An idea which Spike whole-heartedly supported: why work for a living when you can live in, well, whatever the alternative was to not working?

In other words, if genteel poverty had been good enough for William, even if it got him laughed at, it was good enough for Spike. Why do anything you don't want to do when you don't have to?

Problem was, Spike needed cash.

Wodges of cash.

More cash than he could acquire by picking pockets, burglary, and the pilferage of other people's unconsidered trifles. Plus, frankly, the demon egg scheme, though monetarily promising at the beginning, had been a bad idea all around thanks to a distinct lack of refrigeration – something important nobody had bothered to mention when he'd started THAT particular cash-flow solution.

Which had resulted in the grenade Buffy borrowed from Captain Cardboard really doing a number on his stuff, even if most of it had come from the Sunnydale Municipal Waste Disposal Facility, aka: "The City Dump".

Aaaaaanywayyyyyy…

...ruined lair aside, that particular unanticipated explosion left Spike unable to present Buffy with a big fat pile of cash to last her and the Niblet a good long comfortable while, which not only would have made him a bit of a hero, it would have allowed the Slayer to quit her job at the Doublemeat Palace and stop smelling like used French fry grease.

And whatever it was that was in the Chicken O'Deadlets.

(Spike had the sneaking suspicion that whatever was in those little deep fried lumps of toenails and arseholes, it had little or nothing to do with yellow feet, a beak, and feathers – still, dump enough blood, Tabasco and black pepper on them and they were filling– however, when the smell of 'em regularly oozes greasily out of the hair of the love of your life-death- _whatever_ , it's a bit of a buzzkill.)

That, and being able to quit DMP might improve the Slayer's personality. Lately, Buffy's kicks to Spike's head plus other assorted back alley mischief, lacked her usual conviction. Must be all those extra Doublemeat shifts.

Anyway, thanks to grenades, over-processed chicken byproducts, and bad ideas overall, taking Mr. What's-his-face's offer of a temp job at $6.25 an hour (cash only) as a night guard for the latest Chuck E. Cheese rip-off, almost made sense – even if it came with a uniform the last wearer hadn't bothered to wash before turning in.

All Spike had to do to get paid, was sit in the office and watch television, when he wasn't watching a bunch of monitors that showed Freddy Fartbear, or was it Freddy Fazbear? or whatever that big stupid brown hairy lump was called,— no, wait, the big stupid brown hairy lump's Angel—do nothing (along with his cuddly little robotic mates: a chicken, a fox, and what might have been a bunny) but aimlessly wander around bumping into things in the dark after hours. The former Worst Poet Ever in the U.K. (Uncontested Grand Champion, 1875-1880) leaned back in the duct-taped office chair in the blue gloom of the stifling office, put his booted feet on the cluttered desk, and lit up, blowing a long defiant stream of smoke at the "No Smoking" sign prominently displayed over the monitor which covered Party Room #1.

Had Spike known this boring but easy windfall was coming his way tonight, he would have brought beer and Cheetos Cheesy Pizza Puffs from Clem's stash and the "Best of Temptations" compilation VHS tape he'd swapped a case of spoiled 2% milk and five expired cans of salmon for last week. Still, the swill in a cup ("Chica's Magic Rainbow Drink", red magic flavor, that the job provided "all you can keep down" as a free perk, wasn't half bad.

It tasted like sugary motor oil until he'd emptied half a flask of Bourbon into it.

Spike took another pull, eyes glued on tonight's "Leave it to Beaver" film festival, and spat out Chica's Magic Rainbow Drink so that it splattered on the wall like fresh blood before dumping the rest of his Bourbon supply into the near bucket-sized cup.

The Beaver had gotten himself into yet another whimsically stupid 1950s-style scrape when the phone rang.

Fumbling around without bothering to look, Spike picked up the receiver, eyes glued to the Beaver's antics, "Yeah – Freddy Fazzbear's Pizzaria – all the fun…something…something… sod all…let your anklebiters run amuck for less…"

 _"Hello, hello? Uh, I wanted to record a message for you to help you get settled in on your first night. Um, I actually worked in that office before you. I'm finishing up my last week now, as a matter of fact. So, I know it can be a bit overwhelming, but I'm here to tell you there's nothing to worry about. Uh, you'll do fine. So, let's just focus on getting you through your first week. Okay?"_

"Yeah, first night, whatever, so long's I get paid." The Beaver had caught his trousers on the neighbor's fence, which was a hell of a lot more interesting than the guy on the phone.

 _"Uh, let's see, first there's an introductory greeting from the company that I'm supposed to read. Uh, it's kind of a legal thing, you know. Um, "Welcome to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. A magical place for kids and grown-ups alike, where fantasy and fun come to life. Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for damage to property or person. Upon discovering that damage or death has occurred, a missing person report will be filed within 90 days, or as soon property and premises have been thoroughly cleaned and bleached, and the carpets have been replaced."_

"Uh, come again?" Spike sat up, taking his feet off of the desk.

 _"Blah blah blah, now that might sound bad, I know, but there's really nothing to worry about..."_

"What, me worry? I'm the baddest thing in here, mate!" The Beaver had now torn his pants free from the neighbor's fence and fallen to the ground face down— which was still, marginally more interesting than the recorded message blaring out at him as voiced by some phone guy. Spike dug around in the bottom desk drawer. Ah-ha! he'd found somebody's junk food stash. Spike slammed the drawer shut before tossing a Cheeto (too bad it was the original plain kind) up into the air and catching it in his mouth.

 _"Uh, the animatronic characters here do get a bit quirky at night, but do I blame them? No. If I were forced to sing those same stupid songs for twenty years and I never got a bath? I'd probably be a bit irritable at night too. So, remember, these characters hold a special place in the hearts of children and we need to show them a little respect, right? Okay."_

"Yeah, right, okay, if it makes you happy… wish I'd found Funyons instead… keep the kiddies happy, blah blah blah." The Beaver's older brother dragged the Beaver into the kitchen, torn pants and all, June Cleaver, in all her 1950s glory, was still hot after all these years... even with that hair style!

 _"So, just be aware, the characters do tend to wander a bit. Uh, they're left in some kind of free roaming mode at night. Uh...Something about their servos locking up if they get turned off for too long. Uh, they used to be allowed to walk around during the day too. But then there was The Bite of '87. Yeah. I-It's amazing that the human body can live without the frontal lobe, you know?"_

"Bloody hell, what do you mean, frontal lobe?" Spike clapped his hand to the back of his head, spilling his drink all over the keyboard controlling the monitors in front of him. "Better not be what I think it is, I'm not getting paid enough for this sort of crap!"

 _"Uh, now concerning your safety, the only real risk to you as a night watchman here, if any, is the fact that these characters, uh, if they happen to see you after hours probably won't recognize you as a person. They'll p-most likely see you as a metal endoskeleton without its costume on. Now since that's against the rules here at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, they'll probably try to...forcefully stuff you inside a Freddy Fazbear suit. Um, now, that wouldn't be so bad if the suits themselves weren't filled with crossbeams, wires, and animatronic devices, especially around the facial area. So, you could imagine how having your head forcefully pressed inside one of those could cause a bit of discomfort...and death. Uh, the only parts of you that would likely see the light of day again would be your eyeballs and teeth when they pop out the front of the mask, heh."_

"Hell, I should have stuck to burglarizing this place as originally planned, not letting 'em lock me in with a bunch of homicidal kiddie toys… for minimum wage!" The spilled "magic" drink, red, dribbled unnoticed over the edge of the desk onto the floor. "Still, as the baddest thing in here, what could go wrong?" Spike flopped back down in the battered office chair and put his feet on the desk in front of it.

" _Y-Yeah, they don't tell you these things when you sign up. But hey, first day should be a breeze. I'll chat with you tomorrow. Uh, check those cameras, and remember to close the doors only if absolutely necessary. Gotta conserve power. Alright, good night."_

"Right, sod off… _wanker!"_ After giving the phone a double-fingered salute while hanging up, Spike lit a fresh one off his previous smoke, using somebody's "#1 Dad" mug for an ash tray snarling, "Best soddin' leave me alone, I don't like it when things interrupt my stories!"

The clock struck midnight as Spike resumed his pleasurable snacking while snarking at the television as something left the stage unnoticed in Party Room #1 on monitor #1…


	3. Psycho Pastries and Other Bothers

The Beaver had managed to tear his pants _again_ when Spike noticed that he wasn't the only self-propelled moving object in the office.

Whoever it was, smelled like an overheated electrical appliance soaked in pizza grease about to short out.

And feathers.

Lots of feathers.

With a faint whiff of… dead mouse?

Pretending to be casual, Spike reached over and turned down the small television nestled among the security monitors. The Beaver would have to, "Aw, gee, Wally!" on his own for now.

There was the whine of servos and a clumsy drum solo of heavy footsteps.

Allllll right then… so, a quick riddle kiddies from your dear ol' Uncle Billy: what's heavy and smells like a hot air popcorn popper about to catch fire that a mouse has died in while eating a feather pillow that's been soaked in Kool-Aid?

Spike caught a glimpse of something unnaturally yellow and fluffy reflected behind him in one of the monitors.

Soooo, what's the answer, me wee lit'l anklebiters? One of the soddin' animatronics he was allegedly babysitting, Chica, to be exact, complete with "Let's Eat!" bib and what was possibly a cupcake. With eyes. Whatever it was, it was giggling maniacally.

Which meant that some corporate designer who'd obviously never seen a real live chicken's idea of what was supposed to be a chicken was intently staring down at him over the back of the slowly disintegrating office chair, beak aimed at him like a whimsical orange gun barrel.

Having only seen anything remotely like this during Haight Ashbury's 1967 Summer of Love after having pigged out at a Love In, Spike shook his head, rubbed his eyes on one of the sleeves of the stale smelling uniform shirt that the job required him to wear, swiveled the chair around and snarled as he stood up, "Daddy's busy watching telly, Chica O'Deadlet. Sod _off_!"

Unblinkingly, the nasty thing now stood face to face with him before cocking her head to the side while opening her beak in a blast of thoroughly deceased rodent saying in a saccharine girly voice, "Let's eat, kids!"

"Yeah, (cough) right, (ugh, p.u.!) brilliant idea – nice and tender, but we're fresh out of ankle biters… now, go join your lit'l friends bumpin' around and dentin' the walls – Daddy wants to watch his show!" Spike took the ghastly yellow thing by the shoulders and turned it around – "Bloody 'ell, people who hire these things for parties must really hate kids!" He gave it a push towards the door and stood back expectantly. "Scram!" and then, "Bloody 'ell, where are your ears?" as Chica turned around and went back to eyeballing him. Exasperated, Spike gave the bothersome mechanical interpretation of _Gallus gallus domesticus_ another shove closer to the big metal door that opened out into the hall.

"She's not going to leave, you know." Came a voice behind him.

"Bloody hell, now what?" and "Who the bloody fuck are you?" and then, "Am-scray, Chicken O'Deadlet! I'm tryin' t' watch telly!" all seemed to come out of Spike's mouth at the same time as he turned around to face whoever ELSE was in here with him, interrupting the mind-numbing bliss of TVland.

Unexpectedly obedient, Chica lumbered through the door. Spike pushed the button beside the exit and the big metal door slammed down. If he was stuck with an intruder or two, they wouldn't get far unless they made a runner for the door that mirrored the one he just closed.

Yeah, great plan mate, great plan… might have to bluff this one out or risk a killer migrane if he had to defend himself against whoever it was that had somehow slipped in during his confrontation with mechanized poultry bearing a psychotic pastry.

"How the hell did you get in here?" he said, turning so that his back was to the now closed security door.


	4. Bad Dog!

Spike turned to face this added annoyance with the abrupt realization that his employer had been somewhat economical with the truth when describing his actual working conditions.

In other words, nobody'd mentioned he'd be sharing space with two ghosts if his nose was being honest. The taller of the two framed by the second doorway, a blonde buzzcut type right off the cover of some mercenary magazine or other, stood staring vacantly behind a short, messy sort with unkempt brown hair.

The ambassador of Slackerdom opened his mouth a few times, before finally mumbling, "Welcome to your first nightmare – did you know you almost died a few seconds ago?" The taller, better groomed one merely rolled his eyes.

"Already been there, mate, wasn't anything special – sod off." Seeing as he was dealing with just another form of the undead, Spike flopped back down on his prolapsed stuffing throne deliberately swiveling it so that it faced the bank of monitors, put his feet back on the desk, lit up, and after turning the "Leave it to Beaver" film festival back up, resumed his Cheeto consumption.

He looked back over his shoulder a few minutes later, snarling, "I said, sod off!" while flipping two salt and fake cheese coated fingers at the staring pair.

The two didn't go away. Too bad these Cheetos weren't salted roast soybeans. He could at least throw them at the two ectoplasmic intruders to make them go away… or did that only work in Japan during Setsubun? Not that Spike really cared. "Go away. I'm watching telly."

The mechanical chicken was also back, glowering at Spike through the little glass window in the security door. Spike got up and taped a piece of paper over the window after writing, "Go away." on it in ballpoint before sitting back down to commune with the Beaver.

Whap! It felt like somebody had just smacked him on the head with a rolled up newspaper.

This was the most irritating $6.25 an hour he'd ever experienced. Spike concentrated harder on the little screen.

Whappity whap! Having survived parts of two centuries as Drusilla's favorite toy, Spike's assailant would have to try harder.

Spike turned up the volume, briefly glancing at the other screens. So far nothing was happening. Well then, let's keep it that way, eh mate?

Rattlerattlerattlerattle - "Hey!" – THUD!

Spike glared up at the stained acoustical tiled ceiling, having landed flat on his back when the dying office chair was abruptly yanked out from under him. "You've got my attention. What do you want?"


	5. Other Duties as Assigned

Spike glared up at the stained acoustical tiled ceiling, having landed flat on his back when the dying office chair was yanked out from under him by life after death. "Dude!" the short, unkempt one blurted out, "We'd like, just as soon see you die a painful death, but like, you're already there, man!"

"What gave it away? The fact that 98.6° isn't my thing, or my amazing lack of a pulse?" Spike pulled himself up by the edge of the battered desk, "Or because I didn't completely go sack of hammers when Chica McDeadlet over there behind Door #1 barged in and interrupted my telly time?"

"Whatever." The slacker scratched the back of his unruly head while tall and blonde facepalmed.

"If that's all you have to say about it, piss off. As stated earlier, I'm watching telly." Spike picked up the chair and firmly placed it on its loose casters. "I don't have time for ghosts." He added dismissively.

The more appearance conscious of the visiting spirits held up a piece of paper with something hastily scribbled on it.

"Ooooh, how very, very frightening. Let me guess, you just wrote "Boo!" on that." Spike retrieved his lighter from under the desk, lipped another smoke, and lit up. "I'm quaking in me boots."

The list-bearing ghost shoved his message in Spike's face. Having little or no choice, Spike read it aloud. "I see, a ghost that can spell and make a list. 1. Get us out of here. _No._ 2\. Don't be an idiot." Spike added, "How witty, but I'm not the one bothering somebody who doesn't care. Let's see…. Ahhhh, clever: 3. Find Springtrap. Sorry mate, I don't catch mice – it's not in my job description. 4. Help us lift the curse. Lifting curses is also _not in my job description."_

The spirit retrieved the paper and wrote something on the back, before shoving it in the disinterested vampire's face, "Oh, I see, soooooo, you want me to do 2 and 3, how very nice, very helpful of me if I do— sod off unless you pay me."

"Duuuuuuude, like, can you at least check on Foxy before he like, gets into this office?" The messy spirit who had been fidgeting nervously while this half-conversation was going on, pleaded.

"Get. Out. Of. My. Face." Spike reached for the Cheetos, only to have them slapped out of his hand so that they scattered all over the scarred tile floor, "Oi, I wasn't 'alf done eatin' those… and when I get done with…." he added as both spirits began stomping on the little orange cheez turdz, crushing them into radioactive-looking orange dust. He broke off, eyes on one of the monitors, "Hang on, what 'ave we got here? Looks like we've got ourselves a nasty case of pirates here… or at least a fox what thinks it's one…"

 _That's Foxy. Watch out for him. He's dangerous._ Crewcut scribbled some more, _His hook's razor sharp and his teeth are worse!_

"Bit of a great big fuzzy orange-red ponce, if you ask me – looks like it escaped from a Cheetos bag." Spike said absently as he watched the unaccountably sharp and stabby looking animatronic move across the screen, "This company must really hate kids if they let something like _that_ wander around the place as it pleases – why does it have a hole in its chest?"

"Dunno." Slacker-boy shrugged, "Foxy was brought in after I was murdered. There was another one though, a girl fox – it's now a pile of parts and a mask in one of the back storage lockers. Kids tore it to pieces, corporate retired it, two heads and all."

"Is that sooooooo..." Spike mumbled, fascinated. Dru would have loved this toy, all sharp bitey bits and claws, with the hook as icing on the cake. If he had an address, he could nick the damned thing and have it shipped directly to her as a peace offering… no, better yet, Captain Cardboard and his old lady for blowing up his lair… Wonder what the rates were for a direct shipping to say, Belize… C.O.D.! Rig it so that it would activate as soon as the crate was opened, have it programmed to chase them around their hotel room… replace the other hand with a buzz saw, or maybe… a flamethrower… maybe have it explode when Mrs. Cardboard hit it… oh yeah, all sorts of dangerous fun to be had here and it wouldn't activate his chip!

"So, how do we deal with this situation?" Spike grinned up at the two ghosts, "Because suddenly I remember the rest of my job description."


	6. Cooked Books

_Meanwhile, back on the street…_

Jacob Raus, the only Jewish business owner to actually profit from _Krystalnacht_ in 1938 (don't ask), who cut a deal with the dybbuk which attached itself to him in his favor, and who betrayed his own family for a profit to the Nazis not long after that deal (again, don't ask), was pleased as he ended the cell phone call to his employer's research department.

Highly pleased.

In Jacob's many decades for Wolfrum and Hart, opportunities to rid himself of an unprofitable situation while pocketing the difference, came rarely.

But thanks to a series of unfortunate but highly entertaining incidents in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the Freddy Fazbear's Pizza chain was hemorrhaging money –and Raus's masters, normally tolerant as long as bloodshed and cash balanced out, with favor in the direction of cash, were losing patience.

Fast.

Hiring that _ahtslahn_ , that un-kosher bum, that _lilim_ , the vampire who was trying to break in through the back loading dock to be a security guard and then LOCKING him in the building was a stroke of pure genius. Having his hunch confirmed by Wolfrum and Hart's research department that it was William the Bloody, merely sweetened Jacob's satisfaction at solving the problem of negative cash flow for his masters. Though unaccountably silent since Budapest, the nasty little turd, the _mishugena_ , the _shaygets_ , had a well-earned reputation for indiscriminate destruction, even for a blood rat. With some discreet cooking of the books, the settlement terms of the soon-to-expire insurance policies covering this inconvenient financial drain for the next five nights, William the Bloody's gleefully anticipated random destruction would be quite profitable for Wolfrum and Hart AND Jacob Raus once William the Bloody did what William the Bloody did best, even as Wolfrum and Hart finally cut their losses by shutting down their ill-advised venture into children's entertainment.

NOT that disasters weren't already profitable for an old hand like Jacob: his masters had yet to notice that every time a business venture he was assigned to went belly up, be it an unexpected F-5 tornado in southwestern Missouri or an anticipated economic collapse in Venezuela, near microscopic amounts of cash always disappeared without a trace into various global accounts under various names as administered by Jacob on company time.

As with sand, one grain at a time, a desert can overtake a field, Jacob's long, patient accumulation of wealth at his employer's expense was slow, steady, and… profitable. And as far as Jacob and his dybbuk, the possessing spirit that kept him an easily overlooked un-aging cog in a vast global machine since 1938, were concerned, slow and steady was all right by them.

Satisfied, the slow-motion _macher_ and _momzer_ , Jacob and his ghostly business partner-in-crime, started his well-cared for 1980s BMW sedan and chuckling, drove into the night towards L.A., anticipating flames on the horizon behind him before sunrise, thanks to his suggestion that the part owner of the business about to be closed down, pay the _mishugena_ , the troublemaker on one of the missing night guard's timecards to bypass his inexplicable (to Mr. Henry) lack of a social security number or even a driver's license.

For the sake of keeping things legal and tidy.


	7. Blue Flame

Welllll then, if what Heckle and Jeckle, the two uninvited ghosts which had interrupted Spike's telly time were right, the animatronics he was being paid to guard were about as bright as a box of rocks in the dark side of the moon until midnight.

After midnight, something would kick into gear and the mobile piles of phunn phurr and cookie crumbs became angry revenge 'bots and the fun would begin.

The Mr. and Mrs. Riley Finns would undoubtedly have fun, too, should Spike manage to corral one of these inexplicably dangerous children's entertainers into a packing crate, and send it to South America to their last known address.

Preferably C.O.D. (It's those little thoughtful touches of class which make petty revenge truly petty.)

All right kiddies, how can Uncle Billy steer things his way with minimal effort and risk to himself so that a certain long term pain in his ass and his lovely wife are more than mildly inconvenienced, if not downright killed stone dead without firing off the chip in his nut even once while ensuring that a certain frequently unpleasant Slayer who recently dumped him for no good reason and who reeked of Doublemeat Palace grease looked upon him with flat out worshipful gratitude once he handed over his pay envelope enough to let him use her washer and dryer?

And her shower?

And maybe move into one of her spare bedrooms, seeing as she'd blown his up. Hell, half the town was already living there and taking advantage of her (somewhat leaky) indoor plumbing, why _not_ him?

Ding ding ding! And the answer is, boys and girls: get one of the animatronics that's already out of order and load it into a crate…

And then fix the damned ugly thing by using the tools in the shop right off the back loading doc, with the help of the repair manual that juuuuust happened to be locked in Mr. Henry, the maintenance mechanic's desk…

You know, the one with, "Authorized Personnel Only" printed on the cover. In big red letters. Followed by, "Unauthorized viewers will be prosecuted." in slightly smaller red letters…

Whatever!

Setting aside a creased photo of Mr. Henry and four children standing beside a partially assembled animatronicl fox in in what looked like a garage workshop that was being used as a bookmark, Spike lit up and started riffling through the pages while leaning against the shop wall.

Tapping ash on the floor after a few minutes of squinting down at the badly photocopied operator's instructions, he pinched out and then tucked his cigarette behind one ear before turning the manual upside down so that it made slightly more sense. What a load of crap— the chip in his head was put together better than this kiddie shite. So what if it was made by the lowest bidder for the U.S. Government!

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. Mike (because that's what the nametag on the ghost's uniform shirts said), the taller of the two ghosts handed him a note, _I know what you're planning. Don't._

"Sod off." Spike snapped the manual shut and dropped it on top of a nearby rolling tool cart, "I spy, with my lit'l eye, something shiny…" He strode across the grease stained concrete, "And rather fat – c'mere me ladd-o – unnnngh!" The vampire attempted to drag the half-sitting yellow and purple bear with a microphone in one paw which had been leaning haphazardly in a corner towards the packing crate he'd found out back by the dumpster, "Bloody hell, lay off the pizza, Yogi— that's for the anklebiters, company policy and all that!"

"Duuuuude, that's Fredbear. If you're gonna swipe him, at least get his NAME right!" Jeremy was sitting on an oil drum, watching Spike's efforts with interest while eating, or at least attempting to eat, some stale popcorn he'd pulled out of the office trash can – only it fell through his body and onto the floor.

Which didn't seem to bother him as Slacker-boy kept eating it anyway.

"I don't care if he's bloody Madonna and two pigs in tutus!" Spike grunted as he attempted to heave the large, bulky entertainment unit into the coffin-sized crate. "And you, tall boy, sod off. I'm tryin' to work here!"

Mike was holding up another piece of paper _, Watch out for the mouth on that thing. It killed a kid._

"Well, then, that's just a bonus, innit?" Spike heaved most of the now confirmed fluffy death machine into the crate, "Thought I smelled lunch!" He kicked at the edge of the big wooden box.

Scribble scribble _, You're disgusting._

"'Tis what I am." Spike grinned, "I'm what goes 'bump' in the night and don't you forget it!"

 _This is how it all started._

"Wotcha mean, 'all started'?"

Scribble scribble _, Fredbear killed the original owner's child. Bit the top of his head off._

"Now, THAT'S entertainment… hell, that's practically dinner theater…. Now, where'd they hide that exoskeleton release switch– manual says it's on the back of the head beside the off/on switch…" Spike leaned over Fredbear and groped around the back of the thing's big round head, "Shit!" Demon-faced he leapt back, sucking on the back of his hand, "What the bloody hell was THAT?" he mumbled around the wound.

"Spring lock, dude." Jeremy said. He'd abandoned the remains of the popcorn and was staring down at the now crated toy, "Probably why it's in the shop: safety hazard."

"I like it more and more." Reverting back to human, Spike took the back of his hand out of his mouth and beamed down at his latest project, "Even shut down it bites!"

Scribble scribble, _Easy for you to say!_

"Sod off. Now, where'd that blowtorch go?"

Scribble scribble, _You really need to go to the kitchen._

"Now," Spike paused in the middle of screwing a fresh propane tank onto the blowtorch nozzle and glared at his ghostly nag-bag, "Why the hell would I need to do that when I'm busy here?"

Scribble scribble, _You really, REALLY need to go to the kitchen._

"Sod off. I'm busy!" Spike mumbled as he fished the half-end from behind his ear and lit it.

"Duuuuude," Jeremy looked anxiously in the direction of the kitchen, "Like, dude! Mike's an asshole, but he's right!"

Mike glared at him, and started scribbling again.

"Why the hell should I? I'm not the soddin' cook! Both of you lads, get lost, I'm workin'!" Waving both pests off with a two fingered-salute, Spike adjusted the valve on the torch before repeatedly squeezing the the striker – no luck. "Bloody hell, never could get these soddin' things to work right!" He dropped the striker, turned up the propane flow and held it to his lit cigarette.

Bang!


	8. Gotcha!

"What the soddin' hell was that?" High-pressure blue flame forgotten inches from his face, Spike looked in the direction of the noise.

Mike handed him a note, _Because it's past midnight and Chica's in the kitchen, dumbass!_


	9. Drum Solo

Clang!

Clong!

Clang!

Badda-bing!

Rattatattatattatatta-ploink ploink ploink!

The racket grew louder and more frantic as Spike ran down the dimly lit corridor towards the pizzaria's kitchen, blowtorch and workshop temporarily forgotten. Skidding in through the out door marked "Employees Only" he switched on the near-baseball bat sized Maglight he'd been issued along with the fragrant slightly too large uniform at the beginning of the night shift, and shone it at the source of the noise.

Instead of a regrettably tasty (regrettable as in "he wouldn't be able to partake without a migrane") burglar trying to force open a cash box with a jackhammer, it was the glowering chicken - doing a drum solo on the pots and pans that the Ramones or even the Sex Pistols would have been happy to claim in their prime.

Pinned in place by the intense beam of the Maglight in the dark kitchen, the nasty thing looked up at him in mid pound, and gave a mechanical blink.

Then it giggled at him in a disturbingly human voice, like a small child caught doing something naughty but fun, such as flushing a man's woolen overcoat down the loo.

"All right Colonel's main squeeze, that's enough of that!" Spike took the thing by the sticky elbow and tried to steer it out of the kitchen and away from the cookware, "Anything you break comes outta me pay envelope. We don't want that, now do we?"

It was like trying to convince his DeSoto to start whenever its aging ignition system decided to act up the second an angry mob appeared on the horizon, only fuzzier.

The thing giggled again.

Spike tucked the Maglight under one arm muttering, "C'mon, out with you. An' no playin' wi' matches either!" as he tried to push the obstinate mechanical chicken towards the out door with both hands and into the hall where it could roam free without bothering him or endangering his take home pay.

"Dude," Jeremy was standing right beside him, "You might want to look behind..."

"Sod off!"

The chicken giggled, louder.

"C'mon pet, let's you and me go out into the nice passageway and stop banging on the nasty old… ungh, bloody hell, this thing's heavier than it, ungh, looks!" Spike sniffed as he shoved even harder at the obstinate entertainment unit, there was that dead mouse smell again, "When's the last time you had a wash?"

"Dude! Look! Out!" Jeremy sounded downright alarmed now.

"Bubby!" The chicken squealed.

"Yeah, dude, look out for Bubby!" Jeremy added with a sigh, ("Why do I even bother…")

"Bubby? Who the hell's Bubby?" Spike paused, "Jeremy, if you don't have anything useful to say, sod…"

Crash!

Splat!

Tinkle.

As Spike headed for the floor face first to land in a puddle of pickled hot pepper juice and broken glass, he caught a glimpse of something fuzzy and purple in the dim light coming in through the window over the dishwashing sink.

 _Alll right kiddies, Uncle Billy here again, what's purple, fuzzy, smells like stale pizza grease, and has long floppy ears and sharp pointy teeth and is dragging me by the ankles towards Parts and Service even as I black out?_


	10. Thornbridge Wild Swan

Boots off and just home from work, Spike sat down at the kitchen table as Joyce put a coffee cup of blood nicely heated to body temperature in front of him while the Niblet, sitting beside Tara who was eating buttered toast, whined bitterly about having to eat something healthy for breakfast.

"Listen to your mum." He said in between sips of blood, which was not only the right temperature but fresh, not thawed. "No more Cap'n Crunch, you just had two teeth filled yesterday." Tara, her mouth full of buttered toast and red current jam, nodded in firm agreement.

Dawn whined but complied as he passed her the Wheat-a-Bix and Tara confiscated the sugar bowl.

Barefoot and bed-headed, Buffy padded in wearing one of his shirts as a nightgown, yawned, kissed him on the back of the neck and sat down across from him at the table as Joyce handed him the morning paper.

Spike pulled out a pen and shuffled to the crossword. He was in luck, he'd gotten there before Dawn, who always filled out the easy ones before she inevitably managed to spill orange juice all over it. He got to work trying to figure out 8 down, pizzaria fixtures, sipping absently at dinner.

His mother, carrying a basket of clean clothes up from the basement and wearing a red jogging suit and matching sneakers, which looked odd against her old-fashioned hair style (he still hadn't managed to convince her to get it cut to something more updated, like Joyce's), paused, and picked up his pay envelope from beside the crossword puzzle he was working on. Joyce, who was pouring herself a cup of coffee over by the kitchen sink in a white jogging suit, joined her. The two women exclaimed in delight over the large amount that spilled out. Hugging him, his mother exclaiming over how proud she was that he'd finally found a job that suited his unique abilities– she'd have to mention this in her next letter to crabby old Aunt Bertha, while Joyce handed him a freshly poured pint of Thornbridge Wild Swan as Tara smiled quietly at him from across the table, a bright dribble of red current jam glistening on her chin.

Thanking Joyce, he stirred the beer into his dinner and went back to the puzzle trying to remember another word for "miscellaneous", 13 down. He looked up grinning as Buffy put her small warm feet on top of his larger, much colder ones while giving him a flirtatious look, tipping her head towards their shared upstairs bedroom. Tara smiled again, blushing as Dawn rolled her eyes at them both before asking, "Can I have $50? I need more paintbrushes and nail polish!"

"Yeah, yeah. Wotcha think I'm made of, O+, money?" Still, he pulled a fifty from his pay envelope and handed it to Dawn, who took it from him with a big hug, "And I WANT the change back!" he called after Buffy's little sister as she ran past his mother, who was folding his clothes while watching the vultures eating out of the bird feeder hung outside the pantry window, and out the back door with her schoolbooks. Out in the back yard, Drusilla, mowing the lawn in full Victorian garb, burst into abrupt flame as the sun peered over the horizon. Carrying the last piece of toast, Tara paused, looking over her shoulder at him, brows wrinkled in silent concern and chin coated in red jam, gave him a nervous smile before vanishing into the next room.

Spike looked back down at the puzzle he was working on as Buffy, still drinking hot cocoa with little marshmallows in it, came over and sat down on his lap. She picked up the discarded front page of the Sunnydale Times and giggled, leaning into him, "Look, how sad! Riley and his wife got caught up in a bad drug deal in Mexico City – authorities found the bodies all hacked to itsy bitsy pieces and half eaten by wild dogs all over the Colonia Centro neighborhood and nobody saw a thing– isn't that terrible?"

"Well, isn't that just too bad!" Trying to look like he gave a shit, Spike leaned back in the chair smirking before giving the Slayer a snog, which she returned with lingering interest. "Now pet, give us a 9-letter word for "bad dream" before I finish this so we can go to bed…" he murmured suggestively into her ear, her sleep mussed hair tickling his face.

Smiling brightly, Buffy pulled away from Spike, locking eyes with him as she groped around on the table. Her fingers connected with a red-hot steak knife that he hadn't noticed before. "Oooooh, I know that one. Nightmare!" she said happily as she stabbed him in the face with it.


	11. Body Modifications

Spike screamed as the hot knife punched through one side of his face and out the other so that what should have sounded like, "Bloody hell, Buffy, watch it with that thing, will you?" came out as, "Blaaaaarghgurgle-aaaaarrrrrrrgh!"

And as for the other sharp objects digging into him from all directions? Well…

Anyway, somewhere in the surrounding metal-smelling gloom that was NOT Joyce's kitchen on Alvarado Street, someone said, "Shhhhh…"

Which was quite frankly, a bloody stupid thing to say because when one has what feels like a red-hot steak knife going through one's face like something out of a vintage _Monty Python_ sketch about an astonishingly unappetizing box of assorted chocolates (many of them raw frog flavored), the LAST thing one wants to BE is QUIET.

"Don't move. You've already tripped more than one springlock. If I'm careful, I think I can get you out of this thing without tripping any more."

"Arghleblargle…helllll, arghle…" This was one of the most painful things Spike'd endured to date, though once having a Hellgod play Cat's Cradle with his intestines after she got bored with making like a stress ball with his gallbladder without bothering to remove it from him first ranked pretty high on Spike's, "Things I Do Not Care to Repeat" list. (Anyway, Spike _thought_ it might have been his gallbladder that Glory had gleefully shown him; it had all been so sudden! All he could remember from that particular really bad day was that whatever it had been, it was purplish, wobbly, shaped like a cucumber, and hurt like hell whenever Glory squeezed it. Anyway, it was his very own personal private thing from his very own personal private body, and Glory had no damned business mucking about with it, thank-you-very-much!)

Somewhere also on that list, was the time when Buffy broke his back by dropping a pipe organ on him while setting him on fire at the same time… which had been marginally less painful than having Drusilla take care of him afterwards when she remembered to.

Which was only surpassed by Angelus showing up and deciding to "help".

Realizing that yes indeed, things could be worse, far, far worse, Spike shut up.

"Hold still," The voice, which sounded like an adolescent boy's voice because it kept cracking, "I think I can deactivate the locks. Hold your breath!"

Spike would have laughed at this simple mistake on his rescuer's part if it weren't for something pressing down on one of his eyes with worrisome intensity – any second now he would start having Initiative flashbacks. He swallowed hard, realizing at the same time that something gripped him along the spine, feeling like a dozen sharp teeth eager to snap it.

Hell no, not going through that again!

Something cold slithered up his back, not too far from where Glory'd had her very much big fun with his innards. Sweat began trickling down Spike's back and into his eyes— something he'd not experienced for years outside of certain, uh, more _pleasurable_ activities.

"Just a little longer, aaaaaand…" Something clicked, the teeth retreated. "Whew, got it. Now for the torso…" Snap. "A few more, you okay?"

Spike snarled something that would have been an obscenity if his mouth wasn't now ready for some truly original body jewelry, say, something along the line of a ½" copper water line from ohhh, one of Buffy's toilet's tanks? Complete with black plastic floaty valve bulb thingy? And don't forget to include the attached beaded chain! He'd done the whole safety pin thing back in the 70s and 80s, but bloody hell, nothing like THIS!

Snap, click, "Arms and legs, check! I'm gonna release the headlocks. When I tell you to, move forward, fast as you can!" Something shifted around the base of Spike's skull, "Hold on… I'm going to do one after the other, move when you feel the second one release!"

Click. That wasn't so bad. Spike tensed, ready to escape from what felt like a pile of rattraps that had been tripped, minus the gnawed cheese and dead rats.

He yelled, landing knees down hard on the greasy concrete as whatever was piercing both cheeks while pinning his tongue in place was abruptly pulled out in a gush of cool blood and saliva tinged with WD-40 even as he felt his uniform shirt tear in about a dozen places.

Spike knelt, clawing at his face, trying hard not to remember what had been done to him by the Initiative. Eyes wide, the vampire looked around; in the gloom two glowing yellow eyes abruptly backed away, fading into the shadows, leaving him alone on the floor of the dimly lit Parts and Service department if his nose wasn't lying. He stiffened, drool and blood trickling out of the two neat punctures. Crouched rocking back in forth in front of him was a 14 year old boy with slit-pupil eyes the color of old brass coins and curly hair so red it all but glowed in the dim pre-dawn light trickling in through the dirty skylight overhead.

As somewhere deep in the building a grandfather clock slowly tolled six, Spike stood, one hand on his face, reaching for the boy with his other as light footsteps as if a small crowd of children had run past the Parts and Service door while a puff of confetti blew under it.

The boy faded before he could touch him, leaving behind a battered pirate's eye-patch and a rusty metal hook.

Wiping blood, sweat, and pickled hot pepper juice out of his eyes, Spike staggered out of Parts and Service away from the now standing Fredbear, it's body cavity wide open - spring locks and all, and into the security office. The monitors showed no indication that anything had ever happened, except for the reek of pickled hot peppers wafting in from the kitchen. The animatronics were all obediently filing onto the show stage. Grinning, he shook his head even if it made his face hurt like hell. "Damn, what a _night!"_

Kitchen mess hastily tidied and face throbbing, Spike ambled through the building to the time clock in the break room. Pulling on his duster as he walked past a broken grandfather clock, which was half-hidden by the refrigerator, he reached for the card marked Jeremy Fitzgerald and punched out at exactly 6:25 a.m.

He passed the elderly office manager whom had shown him around the night before clocking out herself, complete with helmet hair, frowsy cardigan, and gaudy Harlequin glasses. Sniffing suspiciously, she looked him up and down, watery eyes glaring out at him from behind thick trifocals at the bloody remains of his shredded uniform shirt where it showed from beneath his duster and rasped, "That'll come out of your paycheck at the end of the week."

She turned back to the time clock and punched in.

6:30 a.m.

Swaggering out the open loading dock door towards a conveniently open manhole cover while reeking of pickled hot peppers, Spike flipped her an unseen jaunty double-fingered salute behind her back mumbling, "Worth it, you stroppy old cow, worth it!"

"Oh, God, ow, my face… bloody hell!" came drifting up through a storm drain two blocks over, startling a small dog in a little red coat marked, "Killer" out for it's early morning walkies into widdling it's way fifteen feet up the street.


	12. Schmuck

It was a beautiful morning in L.A.

Even if it was raining.

Jacob Raus was in excellent spirits on his way to work when he switched on his car's radio and tuned it to KASD, Sunnydale, only to have those spirits match the pavement outside his car window – the news announcer, some schmuck with a voice like a hyperactive buzz saw with a speech impediment mentioned everything BUT Freddy Fazbear's latest financial liability conveniently burning to the ground in the night - thus freeing up a small amount of insurance money towards Mr. Raus's long-range retirement plans.

However, it seemed that the loose cannon he had aimed, had opted not to go off.

This would not do.

"Patience," his dybbuk, his invisible partner counseled, "Patience." Budapest, _Krystalnacht_ , and the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (and the ensuing anti-Italian immigrant violence) didn't happen all at once. These things took time. They required build-up.

They, above all, required patience.

And the dybbuk had enough patience for both of them.


	13. Basil

Spike stared down at the time card marked Jeremy Fitzgerald, or more to the point, the yellow Post It Note stuck to it which read, "I will be deducting the following from this week's wages: the cost of one (1) uniform work shirt (size Medium, pale blue, poly cotton blend w/ custom embroidered name badge) $37.50 plus tax and one (1) gallon glass jar of Del Destino Imported Pepperoncini, hot garlic flavored peppers at $6.50 plus delivery fee and sales tax for a total of $50. Mrs. Inelda Schnelz, office manager."

Spike did the math in his head, "Bloody hell!" he yelled, "That leaves me with only $2 for last night!"

"No, the government gets that."

Stricken, he turned, time card in one hand, a large steel Thermos in the other, and glared down at the dumpy figure of Inelda Schnelz, who had taken the time to meet with him in person at 9 in the evening just as the place was closing down for the night, leaving it to himself. "What?"

"State tax. Social Security… what, you never worked before?" She grated up at him.

"Not. If. I. Could. Help. It. ( _Bitch_ , he added mentally.)"

However, the blatant injustice of it all didn't seem to register on the dragon of Freddy Fazbear's. She added, "There's a rat in the ladies restroom. Deal with it."

Spike paused, blinking at the abrupt switch of topic. "I'm Security, not Pest Control!"

The dragon turned, time card in hand, "That's not my problem."

"Why don't you call the fucking exterminators?"

"Watch your language, there's a lady present!" Schnelz loudly cleared her throat, a sound like a half submerged car backfiring in a swamp, "If word gets out we have rats, this chain will lose even more money. Losing money means losing jobs. Including yours."

"Suits me!"

Schnelz gave him a disgusted look over her garish trifocals, "Okay kid, I'll cut you a deal. Get rid of the rat, and I'll forget the cost of that gallon jar of pickled peppers you showered all over the kitchen last night."

Losing the job with its easy access to mechanical mayhem 'bots, one which he intended to have shipped directly to a certain power couple in South America, meant more than a lousy $2. "I'll deal, Mrs. Schnelz. BUT, ONLY if you toss in the cost of the shirt."

"Deal." Eyeglass chain swinging like a weapon, the Schnelz turned and hobbled over to the time clock and punched out. "Just don't tear anything else up or I'll have the police escort you off the property – no, better yet," She smiled at him with a huge pair of coffee-stained dentures, "You don't have any papers. I'll call Immigration and have your skinny undocumented ass kicked out of this country faster than you can whistle Dixie!"

The door slammed behind her.

Spike shrugged as he clocked in. As far as threats went, deportation as an undocumented illegal alien was a new one on him, though it might be interesting to see what they'd do about a walking dead man with a taste for blood who'd been there before the Taft administration.

That and doubtlessly a near century's worth of fingerprints in the FBI database.

Spike hung his duster in Jeremy's locker, and whistling something from the Ramones, went to deal with the rat.


	14. Curses, etc

After contentedly propping his feet up on the desk, Spike belched without bothering to cover his mouth. The powder room rat had been a nice, fat pisser - a welcome change from frozen black market plasma.

Welcome change aside, he preferred shotgunning the ones that fed from the dumpster behind the Bronze – which he'd unfortunately cleaned out while still learning how to feed himself. Those had a nice, robust bouquet: cheap beer and Bloomin' Onion with a delicate hint of stale cigarette smoke until they took the soddin Onion off the menu! This one had a frozen, greasy pizza aftertaste with a slight hint of Chica's Magic Drink. Still, it made for a nice warm change from the health nuts and scientifically fed market-weight hogs he'd been indirectly feeding from the last few weeks.

Absently sipping blood and Bourbon from the big Thermos, Spike turned to the next page of the technical manual he'd swiped from Parts and Service. What had pierced his face while nearly putting out an eye last night was an integral part of the mechanical morons left wandering around the place after the end of the day shift. Ingenious, really, if he understood what he was reading. It was all part of a super-light exoskeleton covered in fake fur which could spring in and out at once or one at a time.

And the challenge, he thought while scratching at his face where the healing puncture marks showed purple in the cheap fluorescent lights, was how to put that skeleton to work in his favor once the animatronic he'd managed to ship south of the border was released from the packing crate…

A piece of paper being shoved in his face broke Spike's chain of thought. _I saw what you did with that rat. You're disgusting!_

"No, I'm a demon, it's what I do. What's your excuse?" Absently, Spike crumpled the paper and tossed it at the nearby trashcan without looking. Mike's unsolicited opinion bounced off the wall and landed on the floor.

Scribble scribble. _So, are you going to do anything about the curse?_

"What curse?" Not that Spike particularly cared. Out of the corner of one eye he watched the hi-jinx of the "Best of Temptations" video he'd smuggled into the place in one of his duster pockets. At the mention of a curse, William, the annoying little git, began stirring in the back of Spike's subconscious. Damn.

Scribble scribble. _The people who slipped through the cracks, the ones who died here, him, me, are all cursed._

"I slipped through the cracks sometime around 1890, and I've done all right." Spike batted the next note away, "Go haunt somebody who cares." William cared, but William was a boring prat with poor eyesight who took being nice to people all too seriously and because of that, always got kicked in the teeth. The last thing Spike wanted to get tangled up in at the moment was altruism, even if it was in the form of enlightened self-interest.

"Duuude, we died in this pizza stinking shithole and didn't even get like, a funeral or some junk or other!" Jeremy added, "And the missing kids, like, dude, not so much as a picture on a milk carton!"

Scribble scribble. _I injured my back and had to leave the Army. This was the only job I could get!_

"I'm so happy for you." Too late! William stood up in the back of Spike's mind all but screaming,, "Me! Me! I know what it's like to be forgotten, let me help – anyway, if we help, maybe Buffy will love us again!"

"Sod off." was Spike's response to the last few shreds of his previous self. Too bad William wasn't real and standing next to him dancing up and down like Andrew or that other short kid (Jerry? Jerome?) from the Nerd Herd like he hadn't gone all day and somebody'd lost the key to the lavvy. Spike would have happily pulled the little twat's underpants up over his head and set the whole mess on fire. "I'm tryin' to read here. Do you mind?"

"Hell yeah, I mind!" Pacing back and forth in the cramped space of the security office, Jeremy shook his head in a mass of unkempt dark hair, "I've had it with this place. It was supposed to be a temp job so I could start paying off my student loans. Now I'm stuck here forever surrounded by phantom boogersnots and some creep in a yellow bunny suit – and I hate Furries!"

Scribble scribble. _Me too. I don't like how their eyes look at me through the screens._

Raising his scarred eyebrow, Spike looked over at the monitors. According to camera #6, Bonnie was now outside the office door staring at him. Using one finger as a bookmark, Spike closed the manual and looked up at the ghostly two, asking, "What about last night? Where the hell were you two lads when some loony stuffed me in a bear suit so that I got both cheeks pierced without even the consolation of a crunchy frog for desert?"

"Dude, our shift ends at 5."

"Right. Glad to hear it. Union rules or somethin'? Sod off."

Scribble scribble. _How'd you get out of Freddy Fazbear? I didn't._

"I was helped by a teenager with hair only a mother could love– were she colorblind." Spike placed the manual on the battered desktop, "Day-glo red. I mean, Ronald McDonald territory here. Who is he?"

The two ghosts pulled back and started arguing back and forth – which wasn't easy, considering one of them couldn't argue aloud. Spike went back to reading. He'd been right. If he could cut into the main body core with a blowtorch like he'd started to last night, he could get at the remote interface and…

"Now what do you lads want?" Spike reclosed the manual. Jeremy was now leaning over him, close enough to touch were that possible.

"Duuuude," the slacker whispered nervously, "Shit's about to get real. That was Vinnie."


	15. Access Point

"Vinnie? Who the hell is Vinnie, and why is he my problem?" After glancing at the monitors, Spike stood and after pushing past a blankly staring mechanical purple bunny out for a vacant eyed stroll, walked down the dimly lit hallway that led to Parts and Service, and switched on the shop lights.

Fredbear had obviously been repaired as he and the packing crate weren't taking up space where Spike had left them on the floor the night before, like a carefully broken piñata – but that wasn't what the vampire was looking for.

His first biggest mistake earlier before had been in grabbing the first animatronic he saw that wasn't moving. What he needed was something smaller, and less likely to be put back in service right away…

…and he found it, under a pile of broken parts and worn out fursuits.

And it was 'orrible. Beautifully 'orrible.

The fact that it had two heads and sharp pointy teeth was just icing on the cake – a cake that Drusilla would have baked from a recipe that included broken glass and razor blades and was guaranteed to poison anybody within ten miles of the oven as she took it out to cool. That is, if he could have convinced Drusilla to stop trying to unionize the magic pixies living rent-free in her navel long enough to attempt such a culinary obscenity – anyway two heads, a stained and torn fursuit that maybe had started out white with pink accents, and big floppy feet with the underlaying skeleton poking out at dangerous angles, was a good starting point. Spike sniggered, imagining the look on Riley's blandly handsome face when THIS came out of the shipping crate and started chasing him and the little woman around their hotel room or wherever it was they were staying.

Problem was (or was it a benefit?) the thing was in pieces, literally, so that when his two unasked for hauntings caught up with him, Spike had pulled what he thought was MOST of his future fixer upper death machine out of the spare parts heap and more or less laid it out piece by piece in somewhat rational order on the floor by the workbench.

"Vinnie, dude, _Vinnie_!" Anxiously, Jeremy crouched down beside Spike as he rearranged the bits and bobs, "You know, back in the Vinnie, the owner's kid – he disappeared back in the 80s long before I took this job! Big stink, major big stink dude – at the same time there was some other dude killing kids in the area – not here, but L.A. – don't you remember? It was all over the news!"

Having already forgotten his question in the other room, Spike looked across the metal monstrosity he'd found so far and said, "Huh? What the hell are you blattering on about?"

"Vincent Afton. You know, Vinnie! You asked me about him back in the other room."

"Oh. Him." Spike stood, kicking thoughtfully at what he hoped to have up and running, no _rampaging_ , around Mr. and Mrs. Riley Finn's happy home – preferably murdering everything in its path as it did so. And as for an 80s kid killer in L.A., he'd been so busy doing a bit of killing himself at the time to pay much attention to the competition. "I thought Henry was the founder."

"No, co-founder, dude! It was all in the orientation brochure they gave me the first night I worked at the Toy Fazbear's location just off Rodeo Drive in L.A. – didn't they give you one?"

"No." _Huh, a portable ghost… not my problem!_ Spike thought to himself while picking up a screwdriver. If he understood the manual at all, he could access the main operating system in the chest region – only there wasn't one. "They just handed me a shirt and said, "You're hired, mate!" Anyway, who was "this"?" He said absently while kicking thoughtfully at one of the two titanium alloy skulls.

"That's The Mangle."

Scribble. Scribble. Mike had joined them. Lovely. _She replaced Foxy in the Toy location._

" _This_. Is a _she_?" _News to me,_ thought Spike. _Not that it matters. And by all that's unholy, including myself, who the hell designed THIS thing – and what parent would let their kid near it?_

"Dude! It's wearing lipstick... ummmm, sort of."

Spike looked more closely at the head that was in better shape. Lenny and Squiggy were right, it was _sort_ of female. Time to go back to digging through the scrap pile for a somewhat femine torso, then.

Spike paused. He was forgetting something.

He walked back to the Security Office, unplugged the monitor and VCR that he'd been using to watch _Temptations_ on and returned to Parts and Service. After plugging it back in and rewinding the VHS tape of pure gold back to where he'd left the office the first time, he went back to digging around in the pile of robotic rubbish for the Mangle's missing torso and control unit.

Scribble, scribble, scribble, _You have horrible taste._

"Your mother doesn't think so." Spike mumbled around a fresh-lit menthol. He pushed past what looked like the blood stained remains of a Fredbear fursuit.

 _Screw you!._

"Get in line."

Mike scowled and went to sulk in the doorway. Jeremy sat down on the floor to watch _Temptations_. Around 11:50, Spike found the missing torso, "No, that's a bit more like it!" He held the roughly hourglass-shaped pink and white thing up in triumph before hauling it over to the brightly lit workbench.

Jeremy didn't bother looking up from his self-inflicted vegetable-hood in front of the commandeered monitor, and Mike presumably had gone off to sulk somewhere else.

The battered torso gleamed up at him as he unscrewed the back plate to get at the electronics inside. According to the manual, there was a port for a computer jack on a red box thingy. From there, he could access the main core and configure it to do whatever he wanted it to, within limits. Hopefully the CPU wasn't toast. Still, no problem if it was. These things looked like they were modular, and there was a fresh unit on the shelf by the door that was still in the box. He could always yank the old one and slide the new one in its place before driving on.

Damn, that wasn't in the manual! Spike poked at the second and unexpected plate with the metal-handled screwdriver that blocked his access to the inner core of the damned thing. Oh well, he'd found the second set of screws – a few more twists should do it.

The secondary plate came off, revealing a mass of electronic… things.

Things… which weren't in the manual.

"Bollocks!"

As the grandfather clock that was hidden somewhere in the building struck twelve, Spike stuck the screwdriver in and began randomly poking about, hoping to see something that looked like a port.

"I wouldn't use that screwdriver with the metal handle, if I were you." Came a voice from beside him. Still poking around, Spike looked down. It was the kid with the eyes like old brass coins.

"And why the hell not?" God, but this place had ghosts like Buckingham Palace had rats.

"Because in this model, there's an extra capacitor in the main body that's not on the…"

"Sod off, kid." Spike interrupted, "I know what I'm doing, so I don't need a backseat driver!"

"Ok." Said the kid, shrugging. "If you say so, but it can hold quite a char..."

"Daddy's busy, bugger o…" There was a large blue spark accompanied by a sharp, electrical smell and "A-r-r-r-r-r-rggggggh!"

Plus, quite a bit of smoke.

Hair on end and twitching spastically, Spike toppled over backwards, landing heavily on the greasy concrete floor.

Hands on knees, the kid with his Ronald McDonald red 'do and slit pupil eyes leaned over him as twitching all over, the vampire blacked out, "I told you so."


	16. An Unexpected Defibrillation

Spike sat up, shaking his head to rid himself of the thundering rhythm in his ears, only to clutch at his chest and fall back onto the floor.

The shock had restarted his heart; the incessant drumming was it's beating. He shouldn't have been surprised: the same thing happened in 1912 in Frankfurt, when, not recognizing what that thick rubber coated cable overhead was, he'd tried to use it to escape from an exciting but dangerous situation involving three German law enforcement officers, two Jesuit priests, a gallon of holy water, and a nanny goat named Fritz.

The results had been in any language, shocking; it had taken three nights for the heart to give it up and go back to once more being a cold, dead lump of meat of little or no importance residing between his lungs. Still, the noise had been deafening until then, and Drusilla, triggered by the sound of close, easy prey, kept attacking him at the worst possible times.

Which is another story, and not worth going into here.

For now.

He sat up again, only to have the ceiling crash down on him.

Only it wasn't the ceiling, butwhat felt like a collection of steel pipes plus fifty pounds of homicidal Slinkies wrapped in a dank fur coat, which clamped painfully down on his left shoulder and his right hip at the same time. Snarling, he tried untangling himself from the nasty thing, which only made it squeeze harder as he tumbled across the floor with it in a clanking, yelling mass which caught both the monitor and the VCR cords on the way past, dragging _Temptations_ to the floor in strobing flashes of light followed by a loud crash, more blue sparks, followed by total darkness when a fuse blew.

Panting, Spike tried prying the steely jaws gripping his left shoulder loose in the oil stinking darkness, only to have them clamp down harder with an electronic snarl like a steel python shifting it's grip on his body, making his ribs creak. Using one leg of the workbench for leverage he almost managed to slip free only to have his assailant tighten its grip further while the other set of teeth worried at his upper thigh as an intense pain blossomed in Spike's chest, which rapidly shot into his left arm.

Gasping, he stiffened, collapsing into the coils of his attacker– the one thing which aside from a tendency towards bad poetry, genteel poverty, and crippling social anxiety which kept William the Bloody (Awful Poet) a wallflower most of his life finally caught up with Spike, killing him as it had his father, so that when the boy with eyes the color of old brass coins gently coaxed Spike's assailant to release her grip on him, Spike lay curled up on his side on the cold greasy concrete floor in the darkness, heart silent.


	17. Not a Morning Person

Spike rolled over with a whoop sometime around 5:30— burst aorta aside, damn, _what_ a _rush!_ He hadn't had this much fun since taking on that whatever-it-was down in the sewers so that Dawn could steal its eggs for a spell to bring Joyce back. If he could get this thing to do what it did to him to Riley and Mrs. Riley, well… _damn!_

Expecting to be attacked again, he pulled himself to his feet in the dark by the edge of the workbench in the soft false dawn pouring down from the grimy overhead skylight, but the titanium steel alloy beastie lay inert on the floor, endoskeleton gleaming dully through the remains of its tattered fursuit, remaining eye darkly blank. The torso was still on the workbench. With one eye on the heap on the floor, Spike gave it a cautious poke with the half-melted remains of the screwdriver that had started it all.

Nothing happened. There must be some sort of half-charged power unit in the frame on the floor that, like the plate and the condenser that had restarted his heart, wasn't in the manual.

Well, he'd soon sort that out and have the thing ready to dance – only, as exhilarating as his tussle with it had been, he'd have it programmed NOT to attack him but to spring out of a shipping crate like a relentlessly homicidal Jack-In-The-Box at someone he so very dearly hated with every bone in his body.

"Sorry, Maggie's not a morning person."

Spike turned around. Framed in the doorway with their arms over each other's shoulders was the boy with the old coin eyes and a much smaller… girl? Spike couldn't tell. Whatever it was wore glasses and had shaggy hair dyed in sunset candy colors and was dressed in a black leather jacket over a gray turtleneck, a black tutu skirt, and very small Doc Martins.

He/she scowled at him before resting its head on the taller boy's chest. Was that a hint of ragged fox ears in the half-light? And an equally shabby fox tail?

"What the…" Gripping the remains of the screwdriver, Spike bore down on the pair, only to have them fade away as the hidden clock struck six to the sounds of a distant party and a drift of faded confetti which landed unheeded in his scorched hair.


	18. Radical Downsizing

The racket made by the IT and call center workers from India in their large portion of the third floor cubicle farm where Jacob Raus had his office made it next to impossible for him to concentrate Wednesday morning. Their agonized screams even drowned out KASD Radio Sunnydale's raucous morning program that he was fruitlessly listening to while preparing his quarterly report for FazBear's Inc.

It was not as good as he'd initially expected, thanks to the recent dip in the overall economy.

Profits from Wolfrum and Hart's latest venture into the children's entertainment industry were down, not to mention his little retirement scheme, which involved FazBear's Inc. end-of-the-line satellite restaurant in small town Sunnydale going belly up, was not going as smoothly as originally anticipated.

A man, no, a mass of flame _shaped_ like a man, stumbled past his cubicle, screaming in Hindi to Vishnu, who clearly wasn't listening.

At the beginning of the official business year Wolfrum and Hart had brought in Indian contract workers because they were cheaper after firing about three quarters of their regular, tenured IT and call center staff to make room for the new global economy. The flaming contractor had fallen, and was now rudely burning a man-shaped hole in the beige carpet while blocking Jacob's access to that floor's coffee station, had he chosen to take his 10:00 coffee break.

This third floor morning shake-up by upper management was doubtlessly because the considerable savings created by bringing in foreign IT and call center workers while firing their current, local tenured staff did not balance out the contracted worker's charging double the stated estimate costs for project completions along with an upswing in customer complaints while repeatedly moving all contracted project deadlines up, which more than tripled overall costs… so what if it all originally meant Wolfrum and Hart could eliminate entire pension, group insurance, and retirement funds from tenured staff while having them train the newcomers at initial implementation before termination, thus creating a considerable dividend for themselves and their stockholders?

Judging by the screams and smoke outside Jacob's cubicle, Upper Management had decided to cut their losses by firing tall foreign contract workers, starting with the accountant whom had initially recommended hiring them in the first place.

Sweating nervously even as the dybbuk that shared his body reassured Jacob that things were still A-O.K. and that all they had to do was be patient and things would still work as originally planned, Jacob opened his golf umbrella over his workstation as the building's sprinkler system went off, extinguishing the remains of the recently fired.

As the sprinkler system and the fire alarms died down, Jacob Raus brushed off the ashes that had landed on his keyboard, picked up the phone, and with the remains of the man-made indoor downpour dripping from his sheltering umbrella, made a call to the more public face of FazBear's Inc., Mr. Henry.


	19. Hump Day

After clocking out from his second night on the job, Spike finally understood why so many referred to Wednesday as "hump day" – this was because by the time he clocked back in roughly fifteen hours later, he felt as if he'd been roughly taken from behind by Angelus in the good old days without a. warning, and b. without so much as the benefit of sweet talk, chocolates, or even a drop of WD-40, had the stuff been around in the late 1800s.

It began on Spike's way home from work: there was a major blockage on his usual sewage and storm water route beneath Jacinto and Main.

Risking immolation, Spike crawled out of the nearest manhole and stuck to the alleyways until he could get to the next clear sewage access point— which was when he encountered Buffy on her way to working the morning breakfast shift at Doublemeat Palace. Happy to see her, even if he now stank of stale pizza grease, he'd hopscotched his way through the early morning shadows, only to have the Slayer pointedly walk to the brightly lit side of the street while silently giving him her best, "Ewwwwwwwwwww!" look.

Dawn, who was with her, started eagerly towards him, only to have Buffy yank her back before hustling her towards school.

This too, was disappointing - annoying as the Niblet was, Spike was interested in hearing about how she'd done as Juliet in her junior high school's recent staging of _Romeo and Juliet_. Having played the same role more than once himself at the all boy's schools that were the norm for his day (Lady Macbeth had been a relief… sort of.), he'd wanted to compare notes and apologize (sort of) for having missed her stage debut.

Later that morning, after washing the pizza stench and the burnt ends of his hair out in the DIY rigged cold shower he'd cobbled together under his crypt from the showerhead he'd blagged from Xander's apartment and a hose (Xander's dad's), Spike discovered that the car battery he'd been using to power the fridge he'd been storing his food supply in was leakily eating it's way through the marble floor.

Finding a replacement fast meant lurking around the municipal parking garage across the street from the county courthouse until he'd found an unwatched farm truck to nick a heavy-duty battery from. The large, burly redneck that owned the truck had all but beaten the shit out of him when he caught Spike with the hood popped and his truck battery disconnected and under Spike's arm.

Smarting and with a second limp he hadn't started with, Spike settled for the battery of a BMW, which was smaller, and wouldn't hold as big a charge – size and capacity aside, unlike the redneck, the yuppie owner easily backed down when Spike loomed over him in threatening silence, his two farmer blackened eyes and bloody nose doubtlessly contributing to the speed of the owners decision that a battery was a small thing when compared to a human life. His.

Domestic issues settled, Spike fell asleep in front of the telly (well he would have except that the cable company found his illegal tap and disconnected it while he was out "shopping" for a new battery) until noon. Noon was when something very large and very angry had awakened him by screaming nonstop in what sounded like Klingon.

Damn, Charlie, his bookie from the U.K., had tracked him down and wanted its money.

Charlie, a squidgy... thing... that oozed slime... onto... everything it touched... and was too gelatinous to physically assault... refused to leave until it got the two year's brass Spike owed on a couple of dog races at Bellvue, which Spike had skipped out on for the simple reason that he didn't feel like honoring the bets.

Charlie wouldn't settle for kittens or even Spike's last case of Girl Scout Thin Mints (worth more than kittens in the demon world because they kept better). No, it wanted dollars if not pounds and it wanted them NOW, mate, or it wouldn't leave.

Seeing as Charlie had settled on top of Spike's duster, had engulfed his entire bootleg collection of early _Ramones_ tunes, and wasn't afraid of fire, a thoroughly cheesed-off Spike found himself asking Anya for scratch.

Anya was a tough customer who demanded compound interest. Still, she was the only person he know who actually HAD money to lend, plus he wasn't going to be paid until Friday, and anyway, he wanted his duster back and Charlie out – though lactose intolerant in addition to being a rapidly expanding mess in his lair, Charlie had absorbed all of of Spike's Ben and Jerry's "Cool Brittania" freezer stash. So what if it was half melted from the battery dying?

Spike's only consolation with dealing with Anya and the signed, witnessed loan she'd given him at ruinous interest (she too wasn't interested in Thin Mints or kittens, either) was that while the register was open, she'd turned away to answer a customer's question and he'd dropped a random handful of pennies in the drawer. Ha! Let demon girl try to figure out where that extra penny or six came from in the day's take tonight after closing when things didn't add up! (And the fact that's she'd probably whine nonstop to Giles about it just made it all the sweeter.)

One debt swapped for another, duster aired, guts emptied, _Ramones_ mourned and floor mopped, Spike found that he'd spent so much time dealing with various unexpected obstacles to a decent day's sleep that it was time to go back to work.

Worse, he was half an hour late so that by the time he went billyo up the ladder of the nearby manhole, Mrs. Schnelz was waiting for him by the time clock, a stern look on her bulldog face and an invoice for the smashed monitor, the broken VCR, and the previous night's uniform, including the half-eaten pants, in her gnarled hand.

Wanting to rip the time clock off the wall and beat her to death with it, Spike ungraciously accepted the elderly office manager's alternative to blowing half a week's pay on various collateral damages from holding a job by agreeing to remove a thoroughly dead raccoon from deep beneath the crawlspace under the main show stage after changing into another one of Jeremy's old uniforms and accepting her gleeful offer of a garbage bag and a shovel.

Being a death-dealer had always been one of Spike's biggest kicks. However, dealing with the aftermath of his calling, particularly if it was blown up like a balloon in the summer heat and made noises like said balloon slowly deflating while accompanied by smells that even Charlie would find offensive, not so much.

After tossing the manky carcass and its maggot entourage into the dumpster out back and then hurling breakfast after it, a woozy, nauseated Spike crawled under the desk in Security and fell asleep on the floor using his rolled up duster as a pillow around eleven thirty.

Half an hour later as the hidden clock tolled midnight, Freddy slowly lumbered off of the main stage and began purposefully marching in his direction.


	20. Yesterday's News

It is very hard to cop a nap on the job when somebody is repeatedly whapping you in the face with a rolled up newspaper.

It is even harder to cop a nap on the job when the somebody doing the whapping is a ghost with little else to do.

And Jeremy Fitzgerald, the previous occupant of Spike's current shirt was not only a ghost, but a ghost with, you guessed it, very little else to do.

Anyway, having traded places with Mike who usually was the one bothering people with yesterday's news, he put a lot of enthusiasm and effort into it – out of the sheer sake of the novelty of it all.

Problem was, Jeremy was dealing with a vampire who, aside from a chip in his head and occasional random outbreaks of common sense, was used to doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, with a big side order of "who-cares-what-others-think".

Beneath the Security desk, Spike rolled over, wrapped his duster-turned-pillow more tightly around his head, and faced the wall, extremely determined to not have his well-earned collapse after an extremely shitty day interrupted.

Jeremy persisted.

Spike persisted.

The rolled-up newspaper that Jeremy was wielding in lieu of say, a baseball bat, was beginning to fray by the time Mike shoved past Jeremy, and with a look of extreme concentration, hauled back one ghostly booted foot and gave Spike a resounding kick in the ribs that also shook the sheltering desk so that Spike's big steel Thermos, left open and full of the night's meal, toppled over and landed messily on the worn linoleum like the aftermath of a really bad accident involving a semi with a cranked up driver encountering a suicidal white-tailed deer at 2 a.m. in flyover country.

"Oi, I was going to drink that!" Spike shot out from under the battered desk, "And you two wankers HAD to mess with me, didn't you?" Unable to lay rough hands on his two main pests, Spike settled for slapping dustbunnies, no dust RHINOS, from his shirt and hair.

"Freddy's coming."

"Eh?" Spike paused in the middle of picking a rhino out of his hair, "Who the hell is Freddy."

"Duuuuude! Remember that big, loveable bear you're supposed to be guarding?" Jeremy watched the rhino waft to the floor.

"Yeah, the one what pierced me face?"

Scribble scribble, _Different Fred._

"So, how many soddin' Freddy-bears have you two wankers got?" Spike sadly kicked at the remains of dinner. He'd liked that Thermos, and now he'd have to steal another one off of Xander's old man – with any luck, Xander would get blamed and Spike would be there to witness the highly satisfactory row of two men who were more alike than the two of them would admit.

Mike pushed another note in Spike's face. _Two, here usually it's one per store. This is a chain – we're the last link before the worn out ones get tossed into the landfill._ Mike frowned, adding, _Freddy's the brown one. You haven't met her. Yet._

"Her?" Spike picked up the thermos and sloshed it gently. There was a little O+ left— too bad the glass inner lining had shattered into a billion glass cornflakes. He was hungry, but not that hungry.

With a shrug, Spike tossed the remains of dinner into the nearby trashcan.

"Like, Dude, when Freddy gets a mad-on, look out – I mean, she made me the man I am today…"

"What, a bumbling idiot with about as much command of the English language as a road-kill toad? I'm scared. See me tremble?" Spike lit up while glancing at the monitors. Thing 1 and Thing 2 were right, a large brown sort of teddy bear with a battered top-hat was waddle-lumbering surprisingly fast in the general direction of Security.

"She springlocked me at the Rodeo Drive Toy location – I was, like shish-kabobed one lock at a time, dude!"

Scribble scribble, _It wasn't pretty. I found the body._

The bear paused, bent down, and picked up the remains of a party hat that the cleaning staff had missed. It put the hat on its head and started clumsily dancing around.

"Doesn't look all that dangerous to me – about as easily distracted as Dru with a balloon!" Spike mumbled, "Now, you two wankers sod off, I got work to do in Parts and Service."


	21. Mechanical Interlude

Which he did.

Have work.

In Parts and Service.

Problem was, Vinnie was waiting for Spike in Parts and Service once he'd dealt with the latest Fred, presumably a bear.

And Vinnie wouldn't shut up.

If Spike thought sharing space with the Three Stooges minus One was irritating, sharing space with Vinnie was like sharing a stuck elevator with Dawn after two bags of Skittles washed down with Mountain Dew.

Only instead of voluntary sugar poisoning, Vinnie brought to the table endless enthusiasm and a voice that cracked six different directions all at once – he was, after all, fourteen.

Even for ghosts, it seemed, hormones happen.

He followed Spike _everywhere_.

Enthusing.

Beans, in the form of a package of extra hot wasabi edamame from the employee lounge vending machine spat or tossed, didn't send the kid packing.

Nor did salt, sea _or_ table.

Thumb waggling? Forget it!

Some day in the future, Spike would track down the assholes who'd created these little snippets of folklore and hire something to beat them up while he watched laughing. Were they already dead, he'd take the time to make it personal by pissing on their graves.

It got so bad that at one point Spike, while trying to figure out how to re-connect the Mangle's torso with the rest of the Mangle, seriously considered breaking silence with Buffy and calling her house from work. With any luck, Dawn would answer and he'd convince her to come down because he knew what the sight of a girl did to the male psyche at the age of fourteen because he'd once witnessed in person what happened when a pretty young miss with big blue eyes and dark curls once sat down beside a lad of fourteen… who was writing things down in his commonplace book… at a garden party… to enjoy a bit of tea and seedcake… and smiled at him… causing this extremely gallant but socially inept young man in his first pair of real long trousers and whom had shaved for the very first time that morning to go glasses down, spots and all, onto the lawn in a dead faint... In other words: when fanny approaches, silence ensues.

Problem was, as soon as Vinnie went silent, Dawn would feel obligated to fill the gap, landing Spike right back in the hole he was trying to climb out of.

Anyway, bad idea: Dawn had no business roaming the streets of Sunnydale alone because he didn't have time to go fetch her… besides, what if Buffy picked up?

(Not that Spike would mind. He was nothing like that stupid, spotty four-eyed little git of fourteen he'd heard of… He'd be all manly business-like… oh yeah! Give her a lead or… something… or other… maybe not even say a word, just hang up… leave her wondering what the hell was going on… did she miss him? At all?)

(Shut up, William.)

"Like, did you know that Mags designed these two?"

"Huh?" Spike looked up blankly from sorting bits and bobs of his wedding gift to the Mr. and Mrs. Riley Finns of Ass-end Nowhere, South America. Vincent was now sitting next to the Mangle's remains on the workbench, drumming his sneakered heels on the storage drawers beneath. "Two? Wotcha mean, two?"

"You didn't know this is two different units all mixed up?" The boy was bouncing up and down in excitement. "The Mangle was a girl fox, so that Foxy the Pirate would have a sister…. ummmmmmmm, no, a girlfriend… mumble mumble mumble." Yellow eyes paused, blushing red as his hair, "They were gonna be pirates together – but she designed Foxy first."

"You don't say." There was a thud from out in the passageway. Spike glanced towards the source of the noise. Freddy had tipped over again and was busy righting itself with slightly more success than a flipped turtle. Whatever it was that made all of them go weird at midnight was easily distracted – all he'd had to do to keep the big fuzzy dead mouse smelling lumps out from underfoot was toss a handful of random change and small candies he'd scrounged from between the cushions of the beat up couch in the employee lounge in the in their paths. The stupid things had spent the last hour fruitlessly trying to pick candy and coins up with their big spongy fingers. Chica was more of a challenge until Spike locked the kitchen door before it could get at the expensive pots and pans (and jars of pickled peppers) before handing it the old saucepan and lid he'd fished from a nearby dumpster – the experience of spending a better part of two centuries keeping an insomniacal Dru safely occupied during daylight hours so that he could sleep undisturbed had not been wasted in this kiddie madhouse!

Vincent continued, "We, I mean, people used to be real mean to her – she never talked at school, and wore the same dress in Kindergarten. She'd get off our school bus at the housing projects mumblemumblemumble sometimes she'd have a black eye or mumblemumblemumble."

"What the… Speak up, kid!" NOT that Spike was actually listening to all this blather – he had better things to concentrate on.

"I SAID, sometimes…. Sometimes… she'd smell… like, really bad." Vinnie looked down at his hands as they turned a large pirate-style hook over and over, feet pounding harder, adding, "We were like really-really mean to her until one day when we were all in the fourth grade one of the guys, Sean, took her little notebook away from her and threw it down the storm drain on the way home from school and she started crying and ran away and I felt really-really-really bad because I didn't think the other guys were gonna be THAT mean so I climbed down and got it out of there for her and it was open and she was like, really-really-really good at drawing so I showed dad and he showed them to Mr. Henry the guy who made these and he really-really-REALLY liked them but since they were Maggie's drawings we had to ask permission so me and dad took the little notebook to the housing project and we found where Maggie lived and it was really-really dirty and smelled bad, like beer and ashtrays and diapers and old feet and there were babies everywhere and they were dirty, too, and there was trash all over the place, and her mom was this big fat woman who wouldn't get off the couch and her mom's skinny boyfriend yelled for Maggie to come the Hell (sorry, mom says that's a bad word but that's what he said) out and get her goddamned (oops, sorry!) stupid book or he'd beat her ass (sorry that's another bad word but he said it!) so dad said that we'd come later at a better time…

"You can breathe if you want to, kid." Spike stared at Vinnie who was now rocking back and forth on the workbench. Somewhere behind the chip William dithered, not quite sure what to make of any of this. "Anyway, what's this got to do with this?" He gestured at what lay on the workbench.

Though a ghost, Vinnie took a deep breath anyway, mumbling, "We never went back. Dad had me invite Maggie to "Foxy's Pirate Pizzaria – only it wasn't Foxy's then - we needed a new lead character. He liked her fox drawing – but when he offered to pay her for it, Mags said "No." She was afraid her mom's boyfriend Cliff would take the money away and buy drugs with it." He suddenly looked up into the exposed rafters overhead and waved. Spike looked up, Maggie was perched catlike along one of the beams among the shadows. Solomnly she waved back, leather jacket draped across another beam. "So Mr. Henry gave her a job at the workshop in his garage and she helped take care of his kids – once a week we'd all go to some store and buy her new clothes and art stuff, but we'd have to leave it all at Mr. Henry's house because her mom would get mad because she didn't believe in charity."

A drift of dust fell between them. Spike looked up. Maggie was carefully stepping from beam to beam, arms out like the wings of a bird. "And she designed both of these? Sorry mate, but all I see is one thing with two heads."

"Three."

"Sorry, _two_."

"No, see that ball there?" Vinnie pointed, "Pick it up."

Spike picked up the lumpy looking metal ball patchily covered in stained black and pink fun fur and shook it, "Still don't see it."

"Throw it. At the wall. _Hard_."

Spike gave the thing a slight heft like a cricket ball before hurling it at one of the few walls in the place that wasn't covered in steel shelving or posters.

There was a noise like a bottle rocket when the thing, cracking the plaster and suddenly expanding into a much larger cartoon bull's head, complete with debonair little horns and a pencil-thin 'stache.

"Bloody hell, that's amazin' – she… she… That lit'l girl designed it to do _that?"_

"Nope, the Mangle, Margarita, and this guy were prototypes!" Vinnie slipped off of the workbench and joined Spike where he stood staring down at the head – "Mr. Henry came up with the expand-0-skeleton stuff, but Mags created the character – Guillermo the Bull – dad wanted to go portable with an authentic Mexican food truck complete with cool Mariachi music that we could take to festivals! Same thing with the bodies –when assembled, you can store it in a suitcase, arms, legs, hands, maracas, whatever – it all fits! Add a power unit, smack it on something hard and wow, you got an animatronic ready to party wherever you want!" The boy gestured to Maggie, as she picked her way down from the rafters along the tops of the shelves, before peering suspiciously at Spike from behind Vinnie's shoulder. "We're like, so glad you like, decided to come put all of us back together – I thought we were all headed for the dumpster – even the little ones. Did Mr. Henry send you?"

Spike paused, thinking fast.

It wasn't like the kid could actually DO something, or much of something about it if he found out what Spike had in mind for the things on the workbench. Soddin' hell, he was a GHOST – at best all he could expect was another newspaper assault or whatever!

Anyway, the kid knew things about the contraptions that weren't in the manual – might as well let him think what he wanted until Spike could at least get one if not both devices into a packing crate headed to South America. "Yeah, right." He said, not noticing the large yellow bunny as it paused in the doorway and stared at him before padding softly away, a little too fluidly for an animatronic.


	22. Shakin'

Having spent over 100 years as a demon and around demons, Spike's sense of aesthetics had gradually shifted from the wholly human, to the not so human, to "What the hell is that and why is it eating my shoe?" without so much as a blink– so six feet or more of festive anthromorphized pot rost in fun colors was no big deal… but still, _damn!_

"Cool, isn't he? And he's just a prototype!" Vinnie came up beside Spike, adding confidentially, "The pink nose was my idea." Maggie rolled her eyes. "I wanted neon green all over because it sounded cool, but it looked like somebody barfed lime Gatorade all over Guillermo - dad said that would really ruin sales, him looking like barf and all."

"Yeah, ummmm…. right." Spike tilted his head to one side, squinting. Did that nose just leave an afterimage on his retinas? Still, who cares about optical damage when you're being chased around the place by a homicidal bovine in a sombrero!

Yes, Guillermo the Bull had a sombrero.

Complete with festive little dingle balls all around the brim – Giles would have been so very proud.

All righty then… "So how do I turn this wanker on? There's no switch on the back of this thing's head!"

"Slap the right shoulder - he'll start right up, but don't forget his maracas. They came in this morning from one of the L.A. sites with a batch of used-up cupcakes!" Vinnie with Mags in tow ran pointing at a barrel marked "Recyclables Only".

Spike walked past the two teens and began digging around in the barrel, which was overflowing with eyeballed cupcakes. The last time he'd seen pastries like this was when he forgot to clean his fridge for a month. It had taken both him and Clem to subdue them – luckily these cupcakes remained inert as he rummaged through them.

Eventually he noticed a pair of battered googly-eyed maracas grinning at him from a nearby shelf marked, "Cat Food".

They were purple. Bright purple.

Now complete with maracas, the mariachi bull stood about six feet tall in the remains of a neon embroidered black velvet suit, string tie, and an electric blue shirt with tiny round glasses balanced on his broad muzzle. Spike walked around behind the thing and slapped it on the shoulder.

Nothing happened.

He slapped, harder.

Still nothing.

"Wrong shoulder, dumb-ass." Maggie said from somewhere near his elbow. Spike looked down giving her a startled glance. He'd assumed she was mute like Mike. He paused, shrugged, and gave Guillermo a hard slap on the right.

Eyes blinking, Guilllermo's head began swiveling from side to side, jaws opening and shutting as if singing. But except for a slight whirr of servos, the bull was silent, hoof-like hands pumping up and down, feet moving forward in time to the non-existent music.

No big loss, it wasn't like Riley and his wife needed a cheery soundtrack for their disembowling! Spike slapped the thing again just to see what would happen and jumped back as the Gipsy Kings's _Bamboleo_ blared out in a deafening roar while the pink and black animatronic danced majestically towards the center of the room: "…Ese amor llega asi de esta manera, no tiene la culpa, caballo de danza vana…"

"Bloody hell – how do I turn the soddin' volume down?" Spike bellowed, covering his ears as doubled over in pain he went down onn his knees. Having hearing acute enough to hear the heartbeat of a mouse under the floorboards wasn't always an advantage, especially now - this was worse than the time the Initative shut him in a sound-proofed room and played Celine Dion albums at him at ear-bleeding levels just to see what would happen, rendering the _Ramones_ or even the _Sex Pistols_ easy listening by comparison afterwards.

But the cacaphony of passionate Spanish and intricate guitar work didn't faze Vinnie and Maggie. Hand in hand, they walked alongside the mechanical singing bull, looking up at it, Maggie's face radiant. It danced majestically right into the wall and kept on singing, maracas keeping the beat while the LEDs worked into the suit's embroidery rippled and flashed in rainbow time to the music.

Vinnie ran back to the half-deafened Spike, yelling, "Slap his left shoulder blade, that's the volume!"

 _Out in the hallway, the yellow rabbit carefully swept up all the candy and loose change, setting the broom and dust-pan aside with disturbingly nimble hands before easing Freddy to it's feet._

Spike slapped the bull's left shoulder, the volume dropped.

 _The shabby yellow rabbit whispered something in Freddy's frayed ear while turning it around by the shoulders so that it faced the open door to Parts and Service._

 _Freddy stood framed by the doorway, eyebrows lowering, pawlike hands clenching and unclenching, the other animatronics milling behind it._


	23. Vihuela

"Yeah, I know, I know, maracas in a Mariachi band – lame! But dad and Mr. Henry were on a tight budget – Guillermo was going to be the sample they showed our new investors to convince them to help pay for the rest of the band and the food truck." Vinnie said. "There was s'posed to be at least half a band – dad was a big fan of Mariachi. He wanted eleven animatronics like a real Mariachi band, but all we could afford was a trumpet, one of those great big cool guitars, a regular guitar, a violin, and maybe one of those cute little itty bitty guitars with five strings or a harp thingy if we could get one – if we could get the investors to help, we could have all eleven – and shrimp tacos!"

Maggie, now dancing alongside the bull, nodded absently smiling, eyes closed, head swaying in time to the music as Guillermo segued into a Spanish language version of "Hotel California".

"Mags designed the Mangle to be in the band, she would be Margarita, Daisy. She was supposed to wear pretty clothes like Linda Ronstadt in her videos and have a macaw on her shoulder that clicked it's beak in time to the music while she played a little guitar and sang or dance with Foxy but after… after… after what happened to my little brother and then my little sister, the new investors had Mr. Henry turn the Mangle into Funtime Foxy… and… they put Guillermo away so that it never… never, ever… happened." Vinnie whispered, turning away, head down, shoulders slumped.

 _The yellow rabbit didn't like intruders._

 _Intruders caused trouble._

 _Intruders broke the dream._

 _Intruders made the yellow rabbit remember._

"Dad was gonna hire the best Mariachi band in L.A. to do the music and show us how real Mariachi was played... dad wanted to do it right, and launch the truck on Cinco de Mayo… Mags designed a burro, a coyote, an armadillo… and when my little brother died, the new investors said, "We'll take care of it. Do what you're told, it never happened – nobody will know!"

 _The yellow rabbit found remembering painful._

 _The yellow rabbit didn't like pain._

Tears running down his face, the boy collapsed crosslegged on the dirty floor, looking up at Spike where he stood debating the best way to take advantage of the bull's hand action. "And then Mr. Raus sent dad so some place back east, so nobody would know…"

 _Pain was for other people._

 _The intruder had to go._

 _That's what the demon, Simon, said._

Maggie turned away from her creation and put her arms around Vinnie, rocking him. Guillermo kept singing, face to the wall, maraca action spirited.

 _Simon was a hitchhiker the yellow rabbit had picked up… in that place._

 _Simon was useful._

 _Simon had good ideas._

 _And if this good idea worked, the dream wouldn't be broken._

 _And Freddy would keep the dream unbroken, like she always did._

 _Freddy understood._

 _Freddy marched forward towards the intruder, hands outstretched, ready to keep the dream unbroken, the beautiful day, the day when it all went wrong, when… when…_

Spike quickly turned around at the touch on his shoulder to find himself face to face with the animatronic bear he'd distracted earlier with candy and loose change as it's paws clamped down on his throat, lifting him up off the floor as if he weighed nothing. The bear's jaws opened and closed as it began singing in a child's voice, "Happy Birthday" as it shook him like a rag doll, the rest of the animatronics milling around them, pummeling him, pulling at his clothes singing different songs in the voices of children as they savagely yanked at his arms and legs like a disputed favorite toy.

"NO DAD!" Vinnie stood, screaming at the yellow rabbit standing framed by the doorway as Maggie helplessly fluttered around the edges of the fuzzy mob, "It's over, stop it – let us go!"

 _The yellow rabbit considered this, head cocked to one side, one ear missing, listening to Simon._

 _Simon had a lot to say._

 _The yellow rabbit listened._

 _The yellow rabbit found that he agreed with Simon._

 _The yellow rabbit looked through the mass of animated toys eliminating the intruder at his son and shook his head, "No."_

Spike would have yelled in agony as something nearly yanked one of his legs out of its socket, only Freddy's hands cut off all air, all sound. Instead, as with Glory, Spike struggled to stay limp, giving his attackers as little provocation as possible. Eventually they'd get bored and go away if he gave them as little fight as possible even as, still singing, Guillermo the bull backed away from the wall unnoticed, made an abrupt about face and joyfully danced towards the door that led out on to the loading dock out back.

"Dad stop it!" Vinnie stood, trying again, "Mr. Henry sent this one, he'll make everything right, he'll fix all this!" The boy gestured around it, "It's over! Don't you get it?"

 _Simon said something to the yellow rabbit._

 _Something funny._

 _About the intruder._

 _It had to be shared._

Doubled over with laughter, the yellow rabbit said through his stained, but happy mask as Freddy dropped Spike facedown on the dirty floor and began painting it a prettier color with his blood, "Make things right? This loser? Fix it all? Are you joking?"

The animatronics paused, staring as one at the yellow rabbit, their squabble over who got to pull Spike apart first temporarily forgotten.

"No dad. I'm not." Vinnie said quietly as Guillermo clattered out the back door, taking it with him, and danced down the stairs to the alley below before heading out of the alley and down the street, leaving the remains of the door and it's frame at Alvarado and Main to be puzzled over by the Sunnydale Dept. of Public Works as the morning rush hour traffic began.

"This one," The yellow rabbit jeered, gesturing at Spike, "Can't even keep his lovers faithful or his shit together for fifteen minutes without it blowing up in his face. What makes you think he'll make all this, THIS" Laughing, the yellow rabbit straightened, gesturing all around him with with expansive paws, "go away? He's a complete and total failure!"


	24. Furia

There are many dances in the world.

There are rain dances.

There are mating dances.

There is the dance of anger.

And then there is the dance of rage– Spike knew the steps all too well.

It was the dance of lying awake in the dormitories after lights out, apprehensively waiting for one of the larger boys to take advantage of him because they could.

It was the sting of the ruler across the knuckles of his left hand while the other boys laughed.

It was words falling into place beautifully in his head only to come out like a donkey's bray. It was having heartfelt words painfully written down to be read aloud by someone else in a silly voice to laughter… of dropping his slate in the rain so that the words washed away.

… it was being invited to parties as part of the entertainment, it was being told that he wasn't good enough, it was the derisive sneer on his mother's face as she dissolved into dust, it was the mocking look Dru aimed at him over Angelus's naked shoulder, it was having Dru leave him over and over for something better, it was being at the mercy of a monster so big it had not one face but a hundred, it was helplessly writhing against the restraints of an operating table as that monster stirred his brain like so much pink and gray cake batter, it was having to throw himself on the mercy of those he despised, it was having a stake driven into him so that it deliberately missed his heart, it was standing on the outside looking in knowing that everybody was welcome but him no matter how hard he tried, it was watching Joyce's funeral from a distance, it was wildflowers on the sidewalk, it was learning over and over he was merely a convenience easily replaced…

…it was mistaking sex for love.

…it was a bedroom blown to bits.

…it was a beating over a battery, spilled blood and having to take a job.

….it was Buffy telling him off no matter that he'd done everything for her to make it not hurt so much… it was all the flung mud, piss, and shit that he couldn't duck because he never saw it coming…

It was a dance where the steps are blunt force trauma and blood on the walls.

And Spike knew how to dance – demon-faced and snarling and claws fully extended, he reached behind him with both hands, ripping into the stupid bear's belly as singing it gripped him by the back of the neck, grinding his face into the dirty floor.

Rrrrrrip went the cheap polyester fuzz. Crash went Freddy, toppling over backwards into a shelf of absurdly happy masks and spare hands

Thud – rolling end over end, the moronically grinning face of the ridiculous bear trying to kill him caved in with one kick: Spike's dance continued, a violently graceful waltz to the mismatched chorus of the songs of childhood twisted to sell cheap pizza and balloons made in China as howling, he levered himself up off the floor with just the strength of his legs, fists smashing into fake fur-clad bodies in colors never seen in nature as he rose among the puffs of carrion stinking dust, landing kicks against pudgy legs and torsos so that their crassly frivolous owners toppled into each other with electronic squeals – cartoon eyes incapable of expressing anything besides corporate-approved joy opening and shutting even as they tore each other apart with Spike as the epicenter.

The yellow rabbit stood in the doorway, hands at its sides, watching the chaos it had created, Mike and Jeremy stood in the opposite door, faces unreadable.

Vinnie and Maggie huddled in a corner, arms around each other.

Carrying a shovel and a garbage bag Mrs. Schnelz pushed past the two former night guards, snapping turtle face grim with annoyance, "Hey" she hollered at the storm, "Skinny butt! Yeah, you, there's a dead dog in the parking lot. Deal with it!"

The workshop went still.

With a snarl, Spike dropped Chica's detached arm in the middle of beating her with it and faced the dragon of Freddy Fazbear's, "Fuck off and deal with Rover yourself, you wrinkly old trout!" He hurled Chica's arm through the window over the workbench with a crash and a shower of broken glass. "Because I soddin' quit!"


	25. Everclear

It was while emptying the second bottle of Everclear he'd nicked earlier from the nearest 7-11 and watching the sunrise traffic whizz past on the Interstate from within the deep shadows beneath the Chavez Avenue overpass, that Spike realized that on his way out, his boots had punted a small human skull, freeing a handful of sad little braids adorned with golden brown teddy-bear shaped beads— but that might have been the Everclear talking.

Woozily the vampire lifted one foot and squinting, inspected the lugged sole of his left Doc Martin before toppling over backwards in an alcohol-fueled blackout

A handful of little golden brown beads had smiled back at Spike, tiny top hats and all.

Shaking his maracas while singing his electronic heart out, Guillermo set one dancing foot onto the Interstate after the other, beginning his majestic journey towards the soft glow of city lights on the early morning horizon.


	26. Post-It Note

With Radio Sunnydale disappointingly clear of any profitable Spike-induced disasters, Jacob Raus came off the elevator Thursday morning just as the corporate axeman finished his assigned task in the cubicle next to his.

Maintenance stood nearby with bleach, a mop, and a body bag.

Obviously, Management hadn't liked Francine's end of the quarter report.

Jacob saw his own end of quarter report sitting on his desk.

He had submitted it to his supervisor the previous afternoon.

On the cover was a Post-It that hadn't been there when he'd personally handed it to Bob.

The Post-It read, "See me in my office, Bob."

In red ink.

Jacob and his dybbuk did an abrupt about face and got back on the elevator.


	27. Roadside Selfie

After receiving several complaints of a crazed illegal alien dressed in full Mariachi costume while wearing a bull mask and playing the maracas and dancing on the shoulder of the Interstate coming in from Sunnydale and other points east, the California Highway Patrol (CHiP) dispatch office sent two motorcycle officers to investigate before Immigration was called.

Officers Baker and Poncherello were experienced patrolmen.

They'd seen a lot.

But they'd never seen _anything_ like Guillermo, whose battery had run down to the point where his secondary programming kicked in.

Instead of dancing, singing, and maraca playing, he stood at dignified attention as the noon traffic roared past, a pre-recorded message coming from deep within his chest stating in a child's voice, "I belong to Mr. Henry of (address and phone number deleted). Please return me to him for routine maintenance and battery recharging." in both Spanish and English. Occasionally the same message was repeated in French, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.

Trying hard not to laugh once it was determined that the now very dusty Guillermo and his maracas posed no public threat, Officer Poncherello called it in, requesting a van to transport the wayward animatronic back to it's owner.

But not before taking a few Polaroid selfies of himself and his partner with Guillermo for his favorite twin nieces, Juanita and Jacinda, who were six and dearly loved _Freddy Fazbear's_.

As to Officer Baker, who had no little nieces or even nephews for that matter, he merely chalked Guillermo up to just another day's work in L.A.

At least the thing hadn't caused any pile-ups.


	28. Rattlebag

Spike sat up gasping in the fast fading echoes of a dream where he watched a tattered yellow rabbit missing an ear lead a laughing black child, her intricate swirls of braids accentuated by golden brown teddy bear beads, into the darkness while Tara stared at him reproachfully, blood trickling down her chin.

Dry mouthed, he tried to stand up in a rattle of empty bottles as rainwater cascaded down from the surface of the Chavez Street overpass over him— it'd been a while since he'd done this, but he knew the drill.

A fag or six would help until he could either a.) find another bottle and fall into it, or b.) steal another bottle and fall into it, or c. ) (his least favorite option) continue sobering up until he could start assessing the damage.

He dug deep into his damp and Charlie-reeking duster pockets.

Smokes, mentholated, check.

Lighter, steel, butane… uh oh, where'd it go?

His lighter was missing.

Bollocks.

Maybe he'd dropped it.

Spike spent a woozy half hour kicking through the mud, weeds, and trash – no dice.

Double bollocks.

Best backtrack. The thunderstorm drenching Sunnydale dribbled down the inside of his collar and down his back as he tried to remember where he might have left it.

It wasn't the world's best lighter, but he'd had it a long time.

Hell, it had stood by him longer than most people, demon or otherwise.

When he'd had to, he'd put it in a sock and stun someone with it whenever finesse rather than brute force was required.

It made less noise than a double handful of loose nickels. Afterwards, he'd use it to light up a victory smoke.

There was a different clerk at the 7-11, but the pimply girl with the inflamed nose-stud and chartreuse hair hadn't seen it. Resisting the temptation to nick more Everclear and forget about everything a wee bit longer, Spike headed up the street.

The lighter wasn't in the alley behind Willy's, either. Fanging a half-thawed blood bag he'd scored from the rat-faced little owner at half-price because it was one week past expiration, Spike paused in the middle of slurping down his blood Slushie, realizing it must have fallen out of his uniform pant's pocket in last night's unscheduled dust-up.

Double bollocks with a sausage on top.

Hands jammed deep in his duster pockets, Spike moodily sloshed past Buffy on her way home from Doublemeat Palace, not even glancing her way. She stopped, turned, and frowned at him from beneath her umbrella before hurrying home, unsettled.

Damn. The outside door leading out of Parts and Service had been blocked off with a sheet of unpainted plywood, which meant he had to go in through the regular employee's entrance.

It wasn't like Spike could demand the remains of of his paycheck while he was there – no doubt the cost replacing the Parts and Service door and most of Parts and Service would take care of that, or whatever. By now he probably OWED Fazbear's Pizzaria— so much for the fun of rippin' that stupid Chicken O'Deadlet's arm off and beating her with it – or smashing that window… Fun as it had been, they'd have to get in line because Anya would insist he pay her back first – that is, if either party could catch him… _not_ that he had anywhere half-decent to run to...

Bloody hell, all this for a soddin' lighter!

At half past nine by the clock on the courthouse bell tower after circling the block three times at a snail's pace, Spike gave the door handle of the employee entrance a half-hearted pull and with dripping hair and soggy boots, squelched in.

Fingers busy at the old fashioned adding machine beside her, Mrs. Schnelz looked up at him from her desk in the little office beside the time clock, rasping, "You're late."

Mouth working, he'd already heaved up dinner and the rest of the Everclear by the back steps, Spike paused swaying in front of her doorway, before spitting out, "Bloody hell, I'm what?" He blotted his mouth on one damp sleeve of his duster, getting a faceful of Charlie. His stomach gurgled, but having nothing left to threaten him with, it quickly subsided.

The dragon didn't bother looking up as she repeated, "You're late. And watch your goddamned language. There's a lady present." The short, broad fat woman yanked the arm on the side of the relic of a time when ledgers were filled out in ink, studied the results, and then wrote them down with a fountain pen. "Tonight's take is down," she snorted. "Well, that's Thursdays for you!"

Spike shook his head in disbelief, making his headache worse, "After what happened last night?" Still dripping he squidged over to the office and stood over her.

"Shut up, skinny butt, I'm counting." Mrs. Schnelz held up one large knobby hand in warning.

Spike stood in fuming silence as she painstakingly laid the money out by denomination and slowly counted it three times before punching it into the adding machine and writing down the results.

Eventually she glared up at him through her garish glasses and beneath her stiff, old-fashioned perm, making Spike think of a toad in drag, "I clocked you in at nine and saved you about three bucks. What the hell have you been rolling in, shit? You stink, and you look like hell. You did an all day drunk, didn't you?"

Because the Schnelz was dead on, Spike stood head down, hands on the edge of her deask with with a head that felt like Manchester United had used it as a practice ball before he finally said, "I came back for my lighter."

"Get away from my desk, you're dripping on it." The elderly office manager complained while putting down her pen, "I found it in the middle of the mess you made out of Parts and Service." She reached into a drawer, pulled the lighter out and slapped it down on the blotter between them. Straightening, Spike reached for it, she pulled it back, waving a gnarled finger at him, "Forget it, kid. You get this back after you've used the shower in the goddamned employee lounge and changed clothes – you stink." Bright magenta upper lip curled, she looked him up and down, adding, "There's clean uniforms, with Jeremy's name on it in the lounge – Laundry Service dropped 'em off this morning."

Not wanting to add to his existing headache Spike refrained from slugging her, grabbing his only reliable friend, and making a run for it. At least it was dry here. He turned, intending to head for the lounge.

"Get your skinny ass the hell back here."

Exasperated, he turned. "What!"

"Got a job for you." Schnelz dropped his lighter back into her desk drawer, bent under the desk and pulled out a loosely filled garbage bag, shaking it at him so that it rattled like it was full of pencils and maracas. "Swept these beauties up this morning after last night's little dance party before the rest of the staff clocked in. The fucking things were all over the floor; it took me all fucking morning to stitch up the fursuits you ripped open – me and my arthritis! _You owe me._ "

Spike squelched back, hair now sticking out in all directions as his forehead, neck and ears began to itch when the half-washed out product that usually kept it subdued started to dry thanks to the space heater in Inelda's stuffy little office, "And the window? The door?"

"Insurance." Schnelz flapped one knobby hand dismissively before shaking the bag at Spike. "I filed a complaint with the police and told the adjustors it was teenagers, and that you chased the privileged little turds off before things got worse." Spike reached for the bag. She pulled it back out of his reach, opening it, "Take a gander at this, kid."

Spike obeyed, already knowing what he'd see: the loose, dried up remains of what might have been three, maybe four children judging by the number of little skulls, all mingled and tumbled together with four darkly stained plushies like the ones piled high in the gift shop up front: Chica, Freddy, Bonnie, and one other, prolly another teddy.

Well, it certainly explained the dead mouse smell of the place.

Mrs. Schnelz savagely closed the bag of small bones and forsaken toys with a clatter and shoved it at him, "Shovel's in the janitor's closet - deal with it."

Spike stood there bag in both hands, staring at her as she heavily sat back down behind her desk and began recounting the money a fourth time with as much concern as if she'd just handed him a bag of beverage cans to take to the recycler's and not one full of tiny human remains.

"While you're at it, drop this in the corner mailbox for me, and _don't_ let it get wet or the ink will run!" Without looking up she held out a stamped white envelope towards him over the top of her cluttered desk, knocking over a picture of an elderly couple in a heavy silver frame with her elbow.

Spike absently shoved the already stamped letter into a duster pocket. The couple in the silver-framed picture looked vaguely familiar.

"It's local, not like that package I had you put in the Fed Ex overnight drop-box for me on Monday." Mrs. Schnelz laughed, a low, nasty grating sound as she glanced up from her accounts at Spike over the rims of her trifocals after righting the picture with one knobby red-taloned hand, "Nobody screws Inelda Schnelz for free! Seeing as you're only here for insurance reasons, I'll cover for you until you get back, so don't fuck around and take all night doing it!"

Spike turned, bag clattering at his side. He'd come back later after la Schnelz had clocked out and do a bit of poking around before he went back to working on his little surprise for the Finns.

"And one more thing," Annoyed, Spike stopped, looking back at her over his shoulder, "I don't know what the hell's going on around here, but I sure as hell know that this ain't no dead raccoon – put it in consecrated ground somewhere like it deserves, not the goddamned dumpster!"


	29. Camposino

There are many places, many things, in the world that are hidden in plain sight, and this was one of them.

The cemetery had been there long before Sunnydale was Sunnydale and was Valle de la Sol, a crossroads little more than a cluster of dusty adobe huts and barns huddled around a Mission with a Jesuit priest who one day turned his back on his God— and who over three lifetimes transformed it into his own personal feedlot, his own personal abattoir, in his quest for eternity.

But the priest, though hidden in plain sight, is not the object of this story.

The church, with it's single blue glass window high over the rough-hewn altar of White Oak was a good place to pray, so the remaining faithful kept it's doors open long after their priest abandoned them to their fields, vineyards, and orchards. The burial ground around it gave the little cluster of humanity a place to conceal it's pain, giving the _peons_ a place to sit, to pray, and once a year in November to be lit with hundreds of candles as they joyfully remembered what they'd lost, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters; consoling themselves among the carefully tended graves of their ancestors with marigolds, tequila, and small, sweet cakes.

As with all things in time, _la aldea_ faded away, its people absorbed or driven off by the ambitious newcomers, the _gringos,_ just as their ancestors had the Chumash– leaving behind the church with it's hand carved doors and candles to the creosote bush, the Joshua tree, and the coyote, with none left to tend the graves until very few even knew it existed: a few lumps of crumbling adobe poking above the brush on waste ground, the blue window in pieces, the doors gawped at in some _gringo_ museum as folk art, provenance unknown.

But this story is not about forgotten history in plain sight, of blue windows and hand carved doors, of a place forsaken by a priest with too much ambition, where the cars roar heedlessly past on a someday to be forgotten Interstate.

Tara, having spent most of her life as a ghost without having died first, had an instinct for places such as this: like calling to like. She crouched in the dripping bushes, Dawn, herself once a marvel hidden in plain sight beside her, watching Spike against the moon.

Walking home from a movie, they noticed him among the shadows between the ornate downtown streetlamps, a long-ago gift from the priest who turned his back on his God. He too, was hidden in plain sight, so Tara followed him and his burden, Dawn in tow, to this place where she had spent many an hour, traffic the sound of a distant river as lizards sunned themselves on the bones of the church, reading atop the grave of a long gone believer, the leaning markers and the windborne trash one more reminder of how time softens things, absorbs things, until they are bearable.

But this story is not about Tara.

This story is not about Dawn.

They are but two pairs of eyes to watch this story through as it unwinds.

They followed him to this secret of place left to owls and cactus wrens as the storm marched away, the full moon in its wake, leaving behind the smell of hidden green places long forsaken.

He slipped through the gap between a pawn shop and a used car lot, using the secret ways known only to witches, stray cats and foxes, past an abandoned car with absurdly high tailfins, and rusty shopping carts from a long dead grocery chain, through the windblown trash, and now this place, shovel in hand, garbage bag in the other.

One finger over Dawn's lips and eyes concerned, Tara watched him dig into the earth where once _peons_ sat among marigolds and candles drinking tequila while remembering their dead, before scattering something from the bag he carried, something that clattered and rattled softly, barely heard through the muffled rush of traffic as it hit the damp, rocky soil before he covered it, sealing in the pain of whatever it was he was concealing.

Tara didn't have to be a witch to recognize such pain; it was easy for someone who had buried her own dead at 17 and who sensed her own approaching end without knowing how or when it would be. He paused, this odd young-seeming man who had once shown her compassion when she deserved none, looked up at the sky with it's departing storm and quietly said with a shrug, "To whom it may concern." before walking back the way he came, shovel in hand, Dawn's eyes full of silent questions to be answered never.

And as they followed him through the shadows back towards the light of the ornate street lamps made by the last blacksmith in Sunnydale, a man who remembered praying as a boy beside his grandmother while looking up in awe at a small blue glass window, Tara discovered she had bitten through her lip so that blood trickled unheeded down her chin.


	30. Panic Attack

Adding to Jacob's alarm, during the elevator ride down to the underground parking garage beneath the monolith that was Wolfrum and Hart's L.A. office, Jacob's hitchhiker casually suggested that he might want to see if his personal retirement records were missing, to whit, Jacob's personal ledger.

Never one to throw away an old bucket until he knew whether the new one held water, Jacob kept the worn little leather bound book, a gift from his _bubbe_ on his tenth birthday back in Berlin, and the Parker safety pen which had been a _bar mitzvah_ gift in 1910 in one of his suit pockets within easy reach despite the recent onslaught of computers. Every page was a mirror: reported transactions on the left, actual transactions, the little fudges, the discreet funneling of cash into offshore accounts and investments for his benefit for the last nine decades, on the right. Plus a lot of personal expenses, most of them quite small, but still, a man must keep on top of things or everything will all go to pieces if he doesn't

So as the numbers above the door counted down with agonizing slowness, Jacob's hand slid into his right jacket pocket, only to find the little book, his retirement plan at the expense of the company he'd faithfully served since 1938, missing.

Perhaps he had somehow absent-mindedly left it at home (things had been stressful lately, what with quarterly reports due...) when changing from his Tuesday suit to his Wednesday suit… no, wait, he had worn the same suit since Monday, waiting for a dry cleaning sale… still, it had been… How on Earth had he not noticed this?

Nearly hyperventilating, Jacob pulled his elderly BMW over in the side of the L.A. freeway on his way home to pack his bags and flee the country, all but tearing the lovingly tended leather seats out of his car searching for it as the mid-afternoon rush tore past.

What if someone had found the ledger... somewhere… and found the business cards he kept tucked in side the cover… oh God, and mailed it back to… and someone in the mail room had intercepted… His bald spot beaded with sweat, Jacob got down on his knees in the roadside gravel, using the flashlight he kept in the glove compartment, checking again under the driver's seat, but all he found this time was a gum wrapper, Beeman's Original Pepsin, from the bulk lot he'd bought at cost in 1985.

Careful to obey all traffic laws because traffic tickets were avoidable expenses, Jacob drove home, thinking that maybe it was somewhere in his immaculate efficiency apartment in the basement of the complex he'd bought with cash for a song in 1952 at a county tax auction.

With its well-kept second-hand furniture, Jacob's living space endured similar treatment to that of Jacob's car: couch cushions were yanked up and tossed aside, entire kitchen drawers emptied on the spotless but worn linoleum, and faded throw rugs were thrown.

His orderly twin bed was also torn apart, pillow, 1930s pajamas, and 1950s sheets left on the still good 1970s carpet.

His bureau stood drawerless and desecrated, socks and underwear he'd bought wholesale and in retail quantities in 1962, scattered hither, thither and yon.

All closets had been emptied.

All pockets had been examined.

The bathroom, with it's worn but still usable 1940s towels, bulk generic aspirin, gallon bottle of generic mouthwash, and 1970s foot-shaped bathmat (avocado green thrown out by the tenant in 3B) looked like a tornado had gone through it.

Disheveled and tie-less, Jacob sat breathing into a recycled paper bag on his 1940s coffee table at five in the morning, mentally re-inventorying where he'd been the last few days while surrounded by scattered used books, mostly on accounting.

There had been no restaurant stops. Though he could have put them on his company expense account, Jacob's frugality found him eating dry ham sandwiches (The dybbuk heartily approved of Jacob eating ham and other pork products. Anyway, condiments merely added to the overall cost per sandwich so they had to go.) in parking lots in between business calls, sandwiches he'd made from ham he'd bought on clearance from the nearby Costco, along with generic diet colas, bulk generic potato chips, generic white bread, and packed in a steel lunch box he'd purchased at a garage sale in 1975 for 75¢.

Jacob mentally went through any other possibilities, which were limited. Why go to the movies when you have a perfectly good second-hand television to watch after a day's work? Why drink at a bar when you could drink for considerably less in front of that television after acquiring your liquid refreshment wholesale through one of your clients who owed you a favor? Why date when you could peruse the same 1950s Playboy magazine, originally purchased for 50¢, over and over again – oy, that _shayna maidel_ Bettie Page, still an _oytser_ after all these years!

Speaking of clients, maybe he'd…

No, no— Jacob, the _macher_ , the maker of deals, preferred interacting with his clients on the phone once the contract was signed. Anything beyond that was a waste of time. Time he could put to better use cutting new deals while feathering his nest at the expense of his masters…

 _You know, boychik,_ the dybbuk mentioned offhandedly, _there was only one account this week which required personal contact. You know, the one in Sunnydale?_

 _Oy gevalt!_ Jacob thought, running his hands over his damp face, _that_ one. The one that wasn't working out the way he'd planned… how could Henry betray him like this? He'd got the man and his silly toys out of more than one unprofitable scrape over the years since he had approached the man on behalf of Wolfrum and Hart in 1987 after one of his walking candy-colored monstrosities had gone out of control, committing what would have been considered first-degree murder had it been alive.

The dybbuk made the suggestion that now would be a good time to make a discreet little visit to Mr. Henry to straighten things out.


	31. Space Heater

After a long, hot shower, which for once didn't involve the homeless shelter, and a clean dry uniform, Spike spent the rest of the shift limply sprawled out in the battered office chair in front of the bank of monitors, hair like a used Brill-O pad, head thrown back, mouth open, eyes shut, Mrs. Schnelz's space heater aimed at his feet.

Had he remembered to to breathe, Spike would have snored.

Mike and Jeremy stood mute in one door, Vinnie and Maggie huddling together in the other, eyes wide in the shadows come midnight.

Up on the monitors, the animatronics bumbled mindlessly around the old theatre converted into an indoor playground with silent, fixed smiles as a yellow rabbit with one ear wandered among them, pausing in Parts and Service to stoop down and pick up a small rounded object unobserved in the quiet sounds of an old building settling in on itself for the night.


	32. Quack, I mean, meow

At heart, Mr. Henry was a modern day Geppetto, bypassing wood and string for steel cables, hydraulics, and titanium endoskeletons concealed by a whimsical layer of candy-colored synthetic fur.

His first animatronic had been small, clumsy, and flat out grotesque. Constructed in his garage for fun after working all day as an research and development engineer somewhere out in the Valley, the thing had waddled around the driveway quacking, which was silly because cats, even mechanical ones, don't quack.

Still it amused Mrs. Henry, six months pregnant with twins. Enthroned in a lawn chair while enjoying the late spring air as the sun went down, she'd laughed so hard she nearly cried. Ten-year old Vinnie Afton from across the street stood nearby on the sidewalk, skateboard in arms, eyes intent on the little mechanical cat as Mr. Henry ran it though it's paces at the end of a long control cable.

Eventually the holy terror of Diego Circle turned and ran back across the street to his own toy-strewn yard - the Aftons were a large family. At last count Mr. Henry determined that there were three, maybe four, if not three hundred little Aftons, but that was just a rough guestimate based on a rather small data sampling – and picked something up, turning it over and over in his hands with a thoughtful look on his brown face. As the cat shaped frame quacked around the driveway, Vinnie thundered back with a battered stuffed toy, a well-loved little black and white cat with the stuffing oozing out of the joints.

"LOOK! LOOK!" The perpetual motion machine in untied sneakers yelled as he ran up to Mr. Henry, enthusiasticly shaking the battered plushie in the engineer's face, "THIS WILL MAKE IT LOOK LIKE A REAL KITTY IF YOU PULL OUT THE FLUFFY STUFF AND PUT THE OUTSIDES ON YOUR LITTLE ROBOT– THAT WOULD BE SO COOL!" (Vinnie didn't talk. Vinnie yelled.)

The curly dark-haired boy with his constant fidgeting and nonstop noise was annoying, but his enthusiasm was infectious— and his idea made sense. The two of them pulled the stuffing out of the toy, and with the help of some scissors and some needlework on the part of Mrs. Henry who was an avid counted cross-stitcher, the quacking robot cat now had a pelt.

Standing back for a better look, Mr. Henry had to admit that little Vinnie Afton's idea had been a good one. His creation still moved and sounded like a duck, but it now looked more like the cat he had aimed for, so he let the boy, who was the terror of the little cul de sac take over the controls and carefully guide it through its paces, sharp face rapt, hands unusually steady for a boy who was generally seen falling out of trees when he wasn't knocking out his front teeth while riding his bicycle down the steps in front of his parent's house because it seemed a good idea at the time.

Mr. Afton, a frequently unemployed advertising man when he wasn't fighting with his wife, Concita, a very tired-looking woman who worked the night shift at a call center, came out of the house across the street in a pair of worn khaki shorts and an old Led Zepplin concert t-shirt, and watched them as he smoked. After a while he picked his way barefoot through the toy strewn front yard and joined them, eyes intent on the quacking, waddling mechanical feline.

Eventually Afton pointed his cigarette at the robot of indeterminate species and said, "You know, Henry, I think you've got something there!"


	33. Yorick

_High among the dusty ropes and spotlights above what had once been the old theater's stage, the yellow rabbit nervously turned the little skull over and over in it's grubby paws._

 _The rabbit was not pleased._

 _The dream had been broken._

 _The dream had been buried out in the world somewhere, dumped from a garbage bag into wet, gritty soil._

 _This would not do._

 _Simon, the rabbit's hitchhiker, agreed._

 _The rabbit's paws stilled, the skull upside down, as the rabbit debated how best to get the dream back._

 _The dream was important to the yellow rabbit, the one good day, the day when the dream had gone horribly wrong._

 _Simon made a suggestion about how this could be remedied._

 _The yellow rabbit agreed._

 _The yellow rabbit climbed down through the old theater's ductwork, as was his wont, and located the bumbling animatronic which had been relieved of it's burden._

 _The yellow rabbit brought the golden brown bear to a halt, ripped open its belly, and slipped the child's skull inside where it belonged._

 _Simon said that the returned skull would be enough to bring the dream back, so the yellow rabbit, with hands too agile for an animatronic, stitched the golden brown bear's belly back up before releasing it back to it's wandering when the grandfather clock hidden deep within the theater, struck five and all but one of the remaining ghosts faded away._


	34. Mounting Evidence

Raus arrived at Henry's little early 20th century bungalow some time around six in the morning and sat waiting in his car, drinking coffee from a child's Scooby Doo Thermos that a tenant had left behind during a move in 1973 (check the ledger, it's in there).

He didn't want any interruptions in his interview with Mr. Henry about his missing ledger and if maybe he'd seen it. Jacob would have called, but the dybbuk reminded him that calls could be traced. The last thing he wanted at the moment was for his masters to know where he was.

While watching Mr. Henry's teen-aged daughter, Charlotte, or "Charlie", run past where he was parked to the bus stop, he glanced over at the passenger seat; something had slipped out of the quarterly report's folder and landed on the floor.

Photocopied pages.

From his ledger.

Pages detailing the last ten or more years his dealings with FazCorp, including all of his creative accounting.

 _Oy gevalt!_ Obviously Henry had found his ledger, maybe set down somewhere in the little theater turned children's party house with uncharacteristic absentmindedness… and returned it to Corporate… where the wrong eyes had seen it…

…leading to the ominous Post-It note on his quarterly report as Francine's blood oozed beneath the divider and pooled beneath his office chair...

…the same quarterly report he'd snatched off his desk in his flight from Wolfrum and Hart, tucking it under his suit jacket, leaving it on the seat next to him as he made his law-abiding flight home, panic barely under control… Damn the simple-minded engineer's flyover country honesty!

It was right about then that Jacob's long-term advisor, the dybbuk, decided to head for greener pastures.


	35. Local Color

It had been quite a surprise to Mr. Henry when the Highway Patrol van showed up at Mr. Henry's door the previous day with a very dusty Guillermo the Bull in the back.

The local news crew after "local color" was an even bigger surprise, and well, Henry had to admit, a runaway animatronic that he'd seen put in storage years ago along with the other units from the late 1980s on the advice of Wolfrum and Hart, only to learn that it had been dancing along the freeway towards his house, was about locally colorful as you could get.

Colorful or not, he called Mr. Raus to clear any filming with him and FazCorp's silent partners first. Publicity was publicity, but some publicity FazCorp could do without, like the bite of '87 and the following shitstorm.

 _Wolfrum and Hart, FazCorp's new backers, immediately stepped forward, whisking Mr. Afton, Henry's neighbor turned business partner back east to some place called Arkham to recover from his breakdown after finding little Zachery Afton half-dead of a severe head injury in the jaws of Fredbear, with little Sammy Henry disappearing the same day. The parents of the party crashing teenagers who caused the horrible accident were discreetly dealt with, as was the media – but they never found Charlotte's missing twin._

 _Henry would have shut down FazCorp and moved his wife and remaining child back to the Midwest, maybe taking up that robotics professorship at the University of Rolla he'd turned down before the whole nightmare began. However, somebody had to support Mr. Afton's family – FazCorp was all Henry had left; he felt responsible for the whole horrible situation even if it had been a group of teenagers who weren't supposed to be in the building who'd caused the death of a little boy who loved Fredbear almost as much as he loved watching "The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" every morning before school with fellow TMNT fanatic Sammy over a bowl of Cheerios even if Sammy was only four._

 _Henry soldiered on, despite Afton's brief return and disappearance months later, only to lose Vinnie, and several child guests without a trace, of losing Mrs. Henry to suicide, all of it adding to the dull ache in the background that seeing Guillermo in his workshop this morning suddenly made sharp._

Mr. Raus, their liason with Wolfrum and Hart for FazCorp, who'd tidied up this horrible mess as if it never happened, didn't answer his phone. Perhaps he was in a meeting. Reluctantly Henry dealt with the camera crew himself, an ordeal for a man more comfortable among children, animatronic rabbits, and precision calipers than adults with their impatient demands.

 _Wolfrum and Hart handled Maggie— he'd found her frail body with its candy-pink hair in his workroom beaten to death clutching a handful of yellow fun fur a week after losing Vinnie, Mr. Afton again, and the others. Maggie, who calmed Vinnie down amazingly so that he proved an invaluable assistant in Henry's workshop, had been a rare find, a schoolmate of Vinnie's whom Vinnie had brought over one afternoon. The shabbily dressed little girl who reeked of stale cigarette smoke had shyly shown him the drawings in her battered sketchbook at Vinnie's enthusiastic urging; drawings which gave him new ideas beyond copycatting the designs of his and Afton's children's favorite stuffed toys. Mrs. Henry, realizing what Maggie's home life must have been like hired her to help take care of the twins when she wasn't helping in Henry's workshop – anything to keep her out of that mess of too many babies, revolving-door boyfriends, and domestic abuse. When her body in the pretty dress he and Mrs. Henry had given her for her birthday washed up on the other side of L.A. in one of the concrete trapped rivers, Raus took care of that, too, though in his heart, Henry knew she'd deserved better._

 _Wolfrum and Hart also dealt with Maggie's mother's boyfriend of the moment who, when the child failed to show up at home for more than a week, tried to make money from it._

 _Yes, indeed, the partners handled all the messy details. No glitches. No interruptions. No public scandals that would destroy the business he and Afton had slowly built together on a shoestring before his partner decided that if they wanted to go beyond renting Henry's slowly growing collection of animatronics out on the weekends for yuppie kid's backyard birthday parties, they needed a backer with the cash and pull to get them a permanent home for Henry's toys._

Charlotte, the missing Sammy's twin sister shooed the local news reporter away by helping Henry throw a tarp over Guillermo where he stood on their front porch and plugging his power unit into the outside outlet that Henry installed for outdoor parties, giving the prototype animatronic enough juice to walk into Henry's cluttered garage workshop, where he now stood, outer fur suit stripped off, titanium endoskeleton exposed and gleaming under the powerful shoplights.

How Guillermo got loose, Henry had no idea – the bull had been an experiment, a prototype that had been mothballed about the same time as the animatronics which had been in service when Zachery met his end and later when seven children and Afton vanished during a birthday party when electronics all over the building went crazy.

 _Mr. Afton had come back from Arkham… different._


	36. Quinceañera

_Placidly nursing a Diet Coke, Afton sat on the sidelines at his wife Concita's youngest sister's backyard Quinceañera two days after his return from Arkham following the bite incident and Sammy's disappearance less than two days after Zach's funeral._

 _The old keyed-up Afton would have been the life of the party, shaking hands and networking. But tonight it was almost as if he were listening to someone whispering in his ear as he sat quietly smiling and occasionally nodding to himself on the flower decorated patio out back beneath the hundreds of twinkling party lights and softly glowing luminarias on the tables where family, friends, and neighbors mingled over some of the most amazing home-made Mexican food Henry and his wife, Taco Bell having recently been their only experience with south of the border cuisine, had ever experienced._

 _Henry put his business partner's unusual serenity down to medication, and instead watched the birthday girl, Juanita, Concita Afton's youngest sister who'd come all the way from Jalisco to help her with the children after Afton had his breakdown, mingle with her guests like a newly crowned queen in her elaborate white ball gown and tiara just as the Mariachi band struck up a waltz._

 _Juanita's father took a blushing, giggling Juanita's hand and guided her with great dignity to the little portable dance floor which had been rented for the occasion and led her through the steps before handing her off to her male relatives– even the littlest ones, all anxious for their turn at whirling the guest of honor around the polished wooden dance floor to enthusiastic applause from her mother, sisters, grandmothers, cousins, and aunts._

 _Vaguely smiling, Afton stared at nothing, even after Concita led him to join the other guests when the music shifted to something more informal. Eventually, Vinnie, who along with Maggie had been part of his aunt's royal court during the religious portion of the event in the big Catholic Church, who, having shaved off all five whiskers from his chin for the first time that morning and was wearing his first real tuxedo, bounced up to where she sat hunched over her sketchbook and colored pencils, eyeing the Mariachi band with a look of intense concentration. Henry, who'd shown Vinnie how to use a razor because Afton had still been asleep with less than an hour to go before everybody had to pile into the long line of cars to the church after lunch, didn't hear what the arm-waving boy said, but Maggie reluctantly set aside her sketchbook, timidly took his hand, and let him lead her to the dance floor with the rest of the guests, her dress a smaller version of Juanita's._

 _Maggie had been an unforseen blessing, helping unasked Mrs. Henry take care of Charlotte when all his wife wanted to do was sit in bed staring at a snapshot of Sammy holding up his new Turtle action figure in front of last year's Christmas tree. Maggie'd even held Charlotte, in a fluffy pink party dress, in her arms by the altar during the ceremony and later keeping the three year old quiet during the actual mass while the adult Henrys, Methodists lost among clouds of exotic incense, kneeling, rising, and incomprehensible Latin, tried not to remember Zachery Juan Pedro Alonzo Afton's little white rose covered closed coffin in front of the alter earlier in the year while agonizing over the fate of their own missing child._

 _Tonight, she let Vinnie, who had quieted down after losing Zach and Sammy, lead her through the unfamiliar steps. The Henry's hadn't thought it was a very good idea to have such a big party so close to their shared tragedies, but maybe they had been wrong. Maybe such livliness, such happiness for Juanita on her special day, was exactly what everyone needed._

 _And later that evening, Henry, his wife with a limply exhausted Charlotte who had been passed from old lady to old lady and spoiled dreadfully draped snoring over her shoulder, as they walked to their house across the street, stuck his hand in his pocket for his keys and instead, found a folded piece of paper._

 _Standing beneath the street lamp in front of his house, Henry pulled it out, and with the Mariachi playing one last waltz in the background, unfolded it. Maggie had drawn the leader of the Mariachi band as a mustachioed bull, with the other musicians as various other animals: a rooster, a coyote, an armadillo with an elaborately decorated shell – and off to one side, a red fox in a suit like Vinnie's, and a pink and white fox girl with flowers behind her perky ears and a dress like Juanita's, waltzing._


	37. Snapshot

_Henry tacked Maggie's drawing up over his workbench for inspiration the next day before drafting out plans for what would become Guillermo the bull and the two foxes, using second-hand costumes he'd found at a local theatrical shop to dress them with – a new start, a new project was exactly what he, what his wife, needed._

 _Mrs. Henry stitched together the fursuits and tailored the costumes for him –but it had taken her a while because they were more refined than the designs based on the children's stuffed toys. These third generation animatronics would be more graceful and their electronics were a massive upgrade from the previous generation which bumbled (And oh dear God, bit!) around the party house. If any of them somehow got lost or stolen, a primitive GPS system would guide them back to Diego Circle._

 _Above all, they would be highly portable – something that would be needed if Wolfrum and Hart could be convinced to back the idea of a traveling restaurant— like a food truck, only more sophisticated and with a menu based on what had been served at Juanita's Quinceanera if they could only convince the grannies and aunties to part with their secret recipes– with tacos at the bottom of the menu if at all if Henry had anything to say about it._

 _Then he'd take both families on the road, hopping from festival to festival over the summer if he could get things moving quickly enough – for a much needed fresh start._

 _Only it never happened._

Ten years later Henry looked up at the faded drawing, eyes skimming past a framed photo of Stevie Nicks, her arms around a small leukemia patient, Maggie standing beside her with a look of ecstatic delight on her sharp face, with Freddy Fazbear, Chica, Chica's cupcake "Carl", and Bonnie the Bunny grinning while holding up a "Make a Wish Foundation" banner in the background, and a faded Polaroid of Mr. Henry's twins and the Afton kids in fursuits with the heads in their arms taken in front of their first party house, _Fredbear's Family Diner_ sign.

"You can't bring back the past." the engineer turned toymaker shook his head sadly, picking up a screwdriver and turning to where Guillermo's stripped down frame gleamed in the shop lights. "I don't know how you got here," he addressed what could have been but never was, "Last week I signed the release to have you and the older units taken out of storage and assigned to the new site in Sunnydale for one last hurrah before you were all sent to salvage, and here you are. Welp, might as well take you apart to see what I did right while you're here..."

Someone cleared his throat, and it wasn't Mr. Henry.

Mr. Henry looked up and dropped the screwdriver where it hit the greasy concrete unnoticed.

Jacob Raus was staring at him through Guillermo's titanium frame.


	38. Ongepotchket

Jacob Raus hobbled out of Mr. Henry's cluttered workshop with it's animatronic spare parts and half completed projects feeling as if he'd finally accomplished something in the _ongepotchket,_ the hot mess, that had been the last two days.

Granted, the sudden appearance of pain in Jacob's hips, knees, and feet took away most of that satisfaction, but still, a man took his pleasures where he could. Stabbing that _moyshe kapoyer_ , that screw-up in the chest with his own screwdriver had more than made up for the aggravation, the stress of finding his quarterly report… What report?

Oh, yes, _that_ quarterly report… on his desk… or was it on his coffee table? Out of habit, the formerly well-preserved early sixtyish-looking minion of Wolfrum and Hart consulted the dybbuk. Only instead of the comfortingly malevolent presence of his partner for the last six decades all Jacob found was empty, echoing space…

...somewhere in the dark echoing corners...

...of his mind…

...a mind which was a lot fuzzier, a lot darker, than Jacob remembered...

Still, the satisfaction of eliminating a _putz_ , however profitable… what was he saying? Where'd he park his car? Jacob paused on the sidewalk in front of the now burning house of… some _goy_ … shouldn't somebody call for an ambulance? The police? Oh, yes, the _shtik drek_ , the shithead, he'd stabbed with his own butter knife, no, no, it was a screwdriver… hadn't sent the ledger… what ledger? "Oy vey!" Jacob slapped his now heavily lined forehead, exclaiming, " _THAT_ ledger! You'll be forgetting your own head next, Herr Jakob…"

Henri, the stupid Frenchman, hadn't betrayed him after all.

Still, Raus dimly recalled blood on the floor in an office, but exactly whose blood, he was unsure of. Now, where'd he park that car? But instead of his lovingly tended 1935 Frazer Nash Sport Roadster two-seater hulked some boxy monstrosity… still the key fit even if it took his gnarled, arthritic fingers fifteen minutes to get the strangely shaped key into the door lock as a low-rider grunted past…

…anyway, he dimly remembered arguing with the man, that _momzer_ , who denied even knowing about Jacob's ledger… Still, it had been lovely to stab the _schlump_ in the chest… so that he fell back into his ugly metal toy, giving Jacob the idea to go to the kitchen and take a knife out of a drawer and put it in the toy's nasty metal hand and turn it on so that it stabbed it's creator over and over again… while Jacob wrote a suicide note for this latest enemy that wasn't exactly an enemy and put it on his workbench… the nasty cluttered workbench…. _Oy vey!_ Was that a tooth that just fell out of his mouth?

Well, if it wasn't that _amoretz_ , that stupid Frenchman, then who betrayed him? Jacob paused, unsteadily gathering his thoughts, which took a while…. Then it must have been that _alte makhsheyfe_ , that old witch, that _nafka_ , who owned the theater in Sunnydale, who betrayed him to his masters!

After a grinding, jerking start, a drooling, rheumy eyed hairless Jacob gripped the wheel of his lovingly tended BMW in his aching hands and pulled unsteadily out into the street before erratically steering his way to the intersection, where he ran a red light, made a left turn while signaling right, and came to a dead stop in the middle of the intersection to the blaring of horns behind him, barely remembering why he was meandering towards _Outer Hotseplots_ … errrrr, or was it Sunnydale?

Jacob crept his slow, cautious way onto the first exit ramp he saw, hoping it would get him onto the Interstate because… something…. Something…. Something… about a missing ledger…

…and that his masters should never...

"Eh? Stop honking your horn at me, you _faygala_ \- _gey strashe di gens!"_

…see what was in the ledger…

" _Vey is mir,_ I shat my pants again! Maybe it's time to retire after all."

…and he, Jacob, Herr Jakob, would be safe.


	39. The Squidgy Dead

Inelda Schnelz had seen a lot of shit go down in her life, including a stint as an Undesirable as well as a Jew at Dachau, which ended in Auschwitz in '45, but this was the first time the shit stood stinking outside the back door of her beloved Herman's theater after sundown.

It was also, if she wasn't mistaken, dropping maggots on the worn concrete of the loading dock that same back door opened up on.

"Well, well, well," she grated, "I didn't think you'd make it this far, Uncle Jacob, but I forgot how fast shit runs downhill even in this dry climate."

Uncle Jacob's only response was a slushy howl. Schnelz was hard of hearing, but even she was able to make out, "You _nafka!_ ", "My ledger!" (Which sounded like "slesher"), and "How could you?" in that revolting torrent of teeth and bubbling, rotting flesh as he lunged for her throat.

The old lady calmly stepped back as Jacob Raus, losing body parts, clumsily slopped past, "It was easy after you turned my Herman and me into the SS as "Undesirables"." She reached for the long push broom she kept inside the back door for dirty jobs and easily kept him at a handle's distance. "What was your reward?" The heavyset old lady took a deep breath against Jacob's ghastly stench and using the end of the broom, shoved Jacob wetly towards the door in a long streak of filthy decay – how dare he defile Herman's pride and joy? "Did they pay you in marks or in dollars?" she snarled, "Or did they turn their backs so you could drive across the border and out of the 1,000 Year Reich unharmed when you threw us under the bus, uncle?"

Chunks of Raus's decaying flesh landed wetly on the floor as he strained to get at her, milky blind eyes bulging before bursting in their sockets, the bones of his gnarled hands white and sharp as he snagged and tore off one of her sleeves.

Digging her heels into the worn rubber doormat for purchase Inelda bellowed, " _Lign in drerd un bakn beyg_ , may you lie in the ground, and bake bagels!" and without losing her grip on the broom, the old lady slid-shoved her uncle by marriage backwards onto the loading dock and then over the edge, where he landed with a loud "Splattttttt!", a wet mass of decay and squirming maggots on the cracked asphalt.

"Nobody screws Inelda P. Schnelz without paying, this includes _family!"_ Mrs. Schnelz screamed, tossing the broken broom after him before slamming the door shut and locking it. Whimpering, the chunky old lady leaned against the door, bare tattooed forearm pressed hard across her heavily painted mouth to muffle any screams that might be tempted to escape.

After ten minutes according to the nearby time clock, she cautiously peered out the window set within the steel door.

The damply glistening heap of rotting meat, soggy business suit, and Wingtips hadn't moved from where it had landed on the cigarette butt strewn cracked pavement.

Still, Herman's Uncle Jacob might be faking it – he was after all, a _momzer_ , an asshole.

The dragon of Freddy Fazbear's sighed with relief when a few minutes later a passing stray dog spotted the squidgy, decaying mass on the ground at the foot of the loading dock. Sniffing, Fido trotted towards the revolting heap before hurriedly resuming his journey unharmed towards to dumpster behind the Bronze a few doors down, tail clapped tight between his trembling, scrawny back legs.

Some carcasses weren't worth rolling in. Raus was one of them.


	40. Groucho

Thinking that one of Sunnydale's myriad tangle of sewer lines had gone bad, Spike casually swaggered into the alley behind what had been, for the last four nights, his job. Gagging, he reeled backpedaling out of the alley _._ That was no ruptured sewer line– whatever was making that reek, was dead.

Not only was it dead, it was REALLY dead, as in dead with the sincerity of Sunday morning cornball televangelists when asking you to empty your bank account on Jesus's (and their) behalf or the I.R.S. when it came to that same bank account, forget Jesus because well, "render unto Cesar what is Cesar's and we're Cesar" and all that bollocks.

In other words, BLOODY HELL, whatever it was, stank– which was saying an awful lot for someone who spent most of his time in sewers and among the dead in one form or another, be it ambulatory like him, or laying unobtrusively on a slab quietly moldering into dust without bothering anybody unless they had dust allergies.

Still, it was the last night on the job, he was supposed to get paid, and well, he had sod all else to do. Rummaging around in the pockets of his duster, Spike pulled out a somewhat mashed cheap cigar, bit off the end, and lit up. After a few reeking puffs of tobacco with a bouquet like the bleached remains a dog turd on somebody's front lawn, Spike cautiously ventured forward.

What Spike found aggressively stinking beneath a heaving blanket of maggots at the base of the loading dock, had once been a man. There were shoes, Wingtips, the bald, greasy dome of a toothless skull, some long bones, and a soggy suit and power tie mingled with visibly liquefying human flesh. Puffing furiously, because as revolting as the messy heap was, it could be, ahem, _profitable,_ Spike knelt, poking at the turgid mess from a safe upwind distance with a broken broom handle he'd found nearby in the hopes that maybe whomever it had been, had a wallet and some loose change, or at least a pawnable watch on them when whatever had happened had happened.

The putrid mess farted, heaved, and then dissolved further with even more flatulent eruptions when stirred, leaving the bones, the Wingtips, and the maggots at high tide. "Oh my, my, my— is a this signet ring to go with that gold tieclip that I spy with my lit'l eye?" To avoid having to touch the filth which coated it, Spike thrust a wooden chopstick he'd been keeping in the lining of his duster into the gold and obsidian man's ring and held it up, admiring his lucky find. This meant beer for dinner, and blood, the good stuff…

Someone cleared their throat meaningfully at him.

"Sod off, I'm busy!" Cigar jutting from the corner of his mouth, Spike looked up grumbling at having been interrupted in the middle of something so… so... _gainfully entertaining_ , followed by, "Bloody hell, it's the Schnelz!" He rose, pocketing his salvage in spite of the stench.

His worst daymare, (aside from the Initiative getting hold of him again or worse, Buffy truly giving him the boot) Inelda Schnelz, stood outlined by the light spilling from the little office she lurked in like an obese trapdoor spider in the open back doorway.

Torn right sleeve flapping, she tossed down a shovel, followed by a Hefty bag.

Spike glared up at the toadlike old lady as they landed in the gassy puddle so that glop splattered up on his Doc Martens and the lower hem of his duster as he stepped backwards to avoid being cold cocked by a gardening tool. The rat had been a tasty bonus, and bloody hell, dumping a bag's worth of dried up kiddie bones on some vacant lot that had once been a church had been a welcome break in the routine, but this? "Hell no!"

"It's either this or pay for what you did to the chair and the desk in the Security Office last night." She grated flatly at him.

Oh. That.

Spike stooped, trading the broken broom handle for the shovel and bag.

"And while you're at it, get rid of the car." She gestured with one large, knobby hand at an older model BMW parked at the mouth of the alley before slamming the door behind her.

All but dancing with frustrated rage, Spike settled for dropping the bag and shovel and giving her two double-fingered salutes, one per hand.

The door flew back open. Spike shoved his hands deep into his duster pockets, bag and shovel at his feet.

A large, half-used jar of Vicks VapoRub flew out and landed with a clatter.

The door slammed shut again.

Scowling around his cheap cigar, Spike picked up the jar of ointment, smeared a generous portion under his nose, hurled the container so that it shattered on the back wall of the building behind him, and with a stinging upper lip, began shoveling the remains of Jacob Raus into the Hefty bag to the snarled tune of the _Sex Pistol's_ "God Save the Queen".


	41. Down the Rabbit Hole

_The yellow rabbit watched all of this from a vent, though it meant little or nothing to him – it wasn't part of the dream._

 _The dream that had been stolen._

 _The dream where it was all good._

 _Simon said the dream could be rebuilt, that everything was all right. That he had one child left, his favorite._

 _The others could be replaced._

 _And that tonight the last two, the older ones, the boy who killed the children, would see reason and join him in rebuilding the dream._

 _And that the girl would help him._

 _The rabbit slithered backwards from the grille of the vent, deeper into the guts of the old theater. The remaining child would need to be told what to do. Simon told him this. Simon was always right._

 _Simon would show him how to bring the dream back._

 _And it would all be good._


	42. Windfall

"Thanks for doing what you did… last night… I mean, putting the little ones… away." Perched on the workbench, an unusually subdued Vinnie turned the pirate hook over and over in his hands. "I don't think they got what happened to them – I think all they remember is having fun at a party, They didn't want anybody taking it away from them – so they like, tried to kill you, like they did Jeremy and Mike."

"I understand what the hell happened to _me_." Maggie said high overhead where she was tightrope walking among the steel beams. "I remember Mr. Raus telling somebody to dump my body into the sewer when nobody was looking, after… after what happened… a sewer worker found me… I saw it in the newspaper…" Then she added in a very, very small voice, "I was… gross."

"How lovely for you both." mumbled Spike, who after dealing with the gooey remains of Mr. Raus earlier in the evening was now a vampire with no fucks left to give. Still, pushing the man's reeking BMW onto a nearby railroad crossing and setting it on fire in the path of an oncoming Amtrak after dumping the mass of slime and bones that had once been the car's owner in the driver's side seat, had been pots of fun. (Even if it meant padding barefoot around in one of Jeremy's uniforms as his socks, Doc Martens, and Diesels dried from a thorough washing in the staff shower because the Hefty bag had burst in mid-carry on the way to the car with Jacob splattering all over his legs and feet. As for his duster, wellllllll… Spike's unscheduled trip to Splattsville meant carrying it home in a garbage bag until he could deal with getting liquefied corpse out of the leather without ruining it… still, worth it mate, _worth it!)_

Anyway, Spike grinned, hands busy in the guts of the Mangle, the fat roll of singles, fivers, tens and twenties he'd found stashed under the noisome, fly-coated front seat in an old Prince Albert tin, more than made up for the smell. Add that to the now freshly washed bills from Jacob's wallet drying in the loo on a towel rack, plus his gold watch, ring, and tie clip, once pawned on the local demon black market along with his credit cards… AND what he'd made in this anklebiter dumping ground as a temp… bloody hell - it would be more than enough to get him back in Buffy's good graces!

Which meant ten beautiful things as follows:

Buffy could quit her stupid job flipping burgers,

Stay home,

And give all her attention to him once she'd washed the Doublemeat stench out of her hair,

While letting the rest of the Scoobies do… ummmm… whatever it was they did,

Just so long as it got them killed.

Specifically Xander, the big dumb pillock.

Speaking of pillocks, Giles, too, should he ever return.

In as messy a fashion as possible.

However, Spike might let Willow come over and play now and then, but only if she wore that little pink and lavender number AND _if Anya stayed home._

However, Tara could come over and play any time she liked because she was, well, the only nice one in the whole lot.

That and unlike Willow, Tara could cook halfway decent and knew what a washing machine was –Buffy shouldn't have to do all that stuff on her own. Which makes eleven, but why care about accurate numbers when things are finally working?

Long story short, Buffy could stay home, pay attention to him and him only, and… oh yeah, right…

12\. Buffy could finally properly take care of Dawn. The Niblet was doubtlessly running wild again, what with Joyce gone and Buffy working— out tempting fate, that sort of _wossisname_. Could get herself killed doin' that, what with all the Big Bads out there hungry for the newest Little Red… whatever sanctimonious twat said money can't buy happiness obviously never had to do without!

Dwelling upon a future which included clean sheets, someone interesting to share them with, and regular hot showers without some daft tosser staring at him while wanking off, Spike stood back to admire his handiwork. What he'd done with the Mangle before the ghosts showed up tonight was classic Spike: messy, improvised, and guaranteed to maim anyone stupid enough to be standing nearby once activated. That last bit was a shame because he was extremely tired of Jeremy and Mike standing wordlessly at his elbow glaring at him – being incorporeal, anything the Mangle could do to a living thing, was totally wasted on them!

"I was helping one of the hostesses fill balloons for one of the parties on the night all the animatronics went nuts." Vinnie looking upwards as he waved at Maggie; the back of his skull was caved in.

 _Huh? What the hell is the kid wittering on about?_

"Dad was wearing the yellow bunny suit by the front door, greeting the party guests – we thought he was cured – but when the animatronics were running around all gonzo an' shit, he hit me. Hard." The boy's tarnished brass eyes glinted green for a second. "Then he stuffed me in the Foxy unit back in Dad's workroom by the kitchen… like he did the little ones in the other units. Only Maggie was found, and we don't know why!"

 _Yeah. The rabbit. Once I'm done here, he and me are going to have words... Now, where'd I put that roll of duct tape?_

"When you didn't come to school Monday, I went to the Toy Location and… snuck past the police – and like _whoah!_ The cops were there but it never made the news even with all those little kids disappearing!" Maggie sat down, thoughtfully kicking her legs over open space, eyes two dark bruises in the shadows. "Anyway, I met the yellow rabbit in the workshop, I mean, your dad, and he hit me… and… and…" Wailing, Maggie crouched down on the steel beam, arms over her head, rocking. "…Mom didn't care!" Vinnie scrambled up a nearby steel shelf unit and put his arms around her.

 _Wonder if I should install a buzz saw on that third leg thingy? Nah, that'd be gilding the lily!_

"Yeah. Right." Spike tightened a connection on the right hand. Eyes on his work, he reached for the keyboard of the diagnostic computer and punched a key, adding, "So sorry to hear about your loss, etc. etc. etc."

The hand clenched.

Spike punched the key again.

The hand opened - brilliant!

Spike didn't understand how any of this shite worked – it was all bollocks as far as he was concerned, but with Vinnie's guidance, he'd finally reassembled the Mangle. All that was left was to rig a deadman's switch for when the crate was opened and put in a freshly charged battery before marching the nasty thing into the shipping crate standing by the back door with the address he'd filched from a postcard he'd nicked earlier from Buffy's mailbox stenciled on the side.

From there, using Jacob Raus's corporate credit card (thoroughly washed and Febrezed), Spike had arranged earlier over the phone in Mrs. Schnelz's office while fiddling with the silver-framed picture she'd knocked over earlier to have UPS pick it up off the outside loading dock sometime after midnight.

From there? Bang! Splat! Ka-pow, crunch, plus assorted screams and gurgles… _brilliant!_

And then he'd go rabbit hunting.


	43. Party Hearty

_Ten years ago in L.A…_

When you are 8.99999 years old and love teddy bears more than chocolate - except for chocolate Teddy Grahams, which combine two loves one delicious bite at a time - the thought of having your birthday party hosted by a giant walking, TALKING teddy bear holding a chocolate birthday cake is just about enough to make your head go bust!

Which would be bad 'cause if your head did go bust, you couldn't enjoy the party, which led to Penny (short for Penn'niqua) LaMort's main objective once she received the good news: be cool until the day of the party at _Freddy Fazbear's,_ then go totally cray cray!

When the big day FINALLY arrived, Penny was more than prepared for amazing teddy bear birthday fun at Freddy Fazbear's: she had on the t-shirt with Freddy's face on it and the matching skort that her favorite oh-so-cool Aunt Jodi, who was an Ensign in the Navy, had sent her all the way from her submarine, the _Jefferson City_. She had on the teddy bear bead bracelet, anklet, and matching necklace that she made the week before at the Boys and Girl's Club after school not far from where she and her three little brothers and sisters lived.

Best of all, her Aunts Moesha and La'Quisha had spent all afternoon the day before carefully braiding her hair into an amazing swirl of teddy bear beaded braids and extensions as their birthday gift to her. Gramma Ruby, who had her own braiding salon, PAINTED FREDDY FAZBEAR'S FACE on all ten of Penny's tiny fingernails as she sat in front of the t.v. trying reallyreallyreally hard to sit still while her identical twin aunts, who worked at Gramma Ruby's shop, fussed and braided STARS and a HEART into the intricate whorls of her hair, no her _CROWN_ — a crown fit for any princess. Only no princess would get _this_ crown 'cause it was PENNY'S and PENNY'S only. Any princess dumb enough to try'n'talk Penny out of it would be firmly told, "Girlfrien'? Really? This hair is _MINE!_ Get'chu own at my Gramma Ruby's shop – tell Gramma Ruby I sent you 'cause she give you a 10% discount an' I get a whole dollar if you do!"

Clutching the autographed Freddy Fazbear plushie that Ensign Aunt Jodi LaMort (Who couldn't come because she was reallyreallyreally busy doing Ensign stuff underwater, same as Penny planned on doin' some day, only _SHE_ was going to be the _CAPTAIN!_ ) had sent along with the t-shirt— Penny ran ahead of her toooooooooo-slowwwwwwwwww family through the front door as held open by a great big yellow bunny rabbit and into _Freddy Fazbear's_ , ready to party the place down to the ground.

 _The yellow rabbit chose Penny as she raced past him into Freddy Fazbear's because his son, who would return once he brought the dream back, should have only the finest playmates._

 _Simon agreed._

 _The grief of such a radiant child's family at losing such an obviously cherished bonbon, their beloved princess, would feed him for a long time._

 _Simon told the Yellow Rabbit what needed to be done._


	44. Scar

Inelda Schnelz unlocked the door to the upstairs apartment at the back of the little theater turned kiddie entertainment center, and holding her breath against the foulness which blasted out at her, clumsily stepped over the remains of the Grandfather clock which partially blocked them, and ponderously heaved herself up the steep flight one painful step at a time.

Nearly an hour later, she sat drinking coffee in the tiny kitchen of an apartment that was a relic from a time when most shopkeepers lived within a few steps of their cash registers, staring out the window that overlooked the darkened street.

Coffee cup cradled in her large, gnarled hands, she looked up at the pictures and other mementos of a life lived behind one mask or another adorning the wall of the little breakfast nook, the nook which Hermann had built for her when both of them were still jumping at the slightest noise, be it a pigeon landing on the gutter outside, or the postman dropping a letter through the slot at the bottom of the stairs.

Among the theatrical posters and autographed publicity photos was their 50th wedding anniversary photo, taken some time in the 1970s, twin to the one in the heavy silver frame she kept on her desk in her office downstairs.

There was their first wedding photo, taken by some random stranger with Inelda's Box Brownie camera of them in their best on the L.A. County courthouse steps.

There was the one of the two of them taken by another random stranger, standing in front of the front gate of the D.P. camp Hermann had found her in 1945 not long after Auschwitz – he had walked from refugee camp to refugee camp looking for her, wearing out the bottoms of his shoes so that by the time he'd found her in a Red Cross hospital, hands bandaged, scalp a mass of of stitches, his feet showed through the soles, but he'd found her, _(Ai-ai-ai, mazel tov!)_ he'd found her.

There was the one taken at his timid red-haired great-niece's Bat Mitzvah, taken only five years before – Herman looked so frail in this one because he'd refused chemo, " _Schatzi_ , sweetie," he'd said on the long walk home from the doctor's office, "Ehhhh, I've had a good run! Why waste good money on a crabby old _alter kocker_ like me? I've had eighty or so good years - see you on the other side (If there is one!)!"

Absently fingering the harsh white scar along the top of her skull beneath her thinning hair, Inelda looked up at the anniversary photo again, sighing, "I'm sorry _zeisele._ I'm sorry it's taken so long, but I wanted to be sure that _shaygetz_ , _goy_ that he is, was right for the job."

A single tear slowly zigzagged down Inelda's toad-like face, dropping unnoticed in her coffee.


	45. Eructations and Other Warnings

The geriatric plumbing of the old theater once known as the _Grand Rialto_ , was a moody force with laws of its own. Sometimes it gurgled and grumbled to itself. Other times, it behaved with old-fashioned, ladylike propriety.

Then there were the days when it seemingly decided that if the End of Days really were nigh, it might as well add to the overall fun.

"Fun" as in *dyspeptic rumblings that, had the building been a living creature, anyone standing near him, her, or it would have quickly moved away from, fearing being caught in an eruption of near Vesuvian proportions – complete with burning lava bombs, screaming crowds, and really _really_ nasty smells.

Having existed slightly longer than the _Grand Rialto_ with the living, well, _undead_ walking-around version of the _Grand Rialto's_ plumbing in the form of Drusilla, Spike paid little heed to the occasional building-shaking rumbles, mysterious subterranean rattling, and near-tantrums of the miles and miles worth of _San Andreas_ Fault battered pipes and drains which lurked beneath the floors, walls and ceilings of the theater turned kiddie meltdown factory by Wolfrum and Hart as fronted by FazCorp .

Plainly spoken, as with Drusilla, if something wasn't on fire or trying to pull your head off to use as a football, ignore it.

In fact, such upsets as far as Spike was concerned, could be downright entertaining when properly aimed… or again, properly ignored in favor of something more interesting – such as revenge on a tight deadline.

Tonight was no exception.

Spike paused in preparing the Mangle for shipping and looked up at the sweaty network of pipes overhead as they suddenly shook, making a noise rather like the one the _Titanic_ made as it made it's final, deadly plunge towards the bottom of the North Atlantic after that rather unexpected encounter with an iceberg…

…something Spike had been miles away from when it happened. The _Lusitania_ and the _Hindenburg,_ however, were completely different stories.

Anyway, the pipes eventually settled down and Spike resumed rigging the deadman's switch, only to be interrupted once more; this time by the phone ringing.

"Bloody hell!" Spike stomped away from the workbench, rudely storming through Mike and Jeremy towards the ruins of the Security room. He'd already been warned twice about ignoring the phone by the Schnelz: it meant a dock in pay if he did. "Can't a man get a moment's peace 'round here?"

Unexpected (and disgusting) cash windfalls from the squidgy dead aside, when you have little or nothing in your pockets but lint, loose change issued by six now-defunct political regimes, three crumpled racing forms (losing) from the nearest dog track, and the clotted remains of this morning's blood bag, a week's pay, even at minimum wage, is an awful lot.

The _Grand Rialto_ echoed Spike's irritation with a long, drawn out moan, sounding like a randy bull whale at the sight of a tour boat full of ecotourists off the coast of Hawaii during mating season, followed by all the toilets bubbling.

 _*Uncle Billy here— didja miss me? Ennyway, look it up kiddies, 'tis an old-fashioned but useful word what makes you sound more intelligent than you actually are. Thank me later for the thrashing (look that one up too) what you'll get from your family and friends because you just used big words around them that they didn't understand, like "defecate", "flatulence", and "eructation"! (Anyway, oi, I'm still around, just stepped out, heh-heh-heh, for a quick pint and a smoke or six, so mind your backs!)_


	46. Simon Says

_The yellow rabbit did not like the man with white hair for not dying right away._

 _The yellow rabbit did not like the man with white hair for not dying later._

 _The yellow rabbit especially did not like the man with white hair because he was arrogant, swaggering everywhere, poking his dirty fingers into places they did not belong, breaking the dream. The dream where it all came out right, that the boy came back, and everyone was happy._

 _Breaking the dream was unpardonable._

 _The others who didn't fit the dream, uninvited guests to the party, had been easily edited out._

 _The tall man with the brush haircut and the sour face a few weeks earlier had screamed, clutching his back and falling to his knees when he tried to get away._

 _Making it easy to edit him out of the dream._

 _Snip. Snip._

 _The messy short man who ate all the time without getting fat, who slept when he should be watching the Toy location, had been even easier._

 _Snip. Snip._

 _The aggressively cheerful man at the Cafe location who wouldn't stay off of the telephone..._

 _It had taken five nights, but in the end, he too, had been edited out— leaving behind only his voice to disturb future intruders into making mistakes._

 _Snip. Snip._

 _The man with white hair was not only harder to edit out, but he broke the dream._

 _He._

 _Broke._

 _The._

 _Dream._

 _And now the children, the carefully chosen guests, all but three, were gone._

 _His son would not come back with only three guests at the party. Whom would he play with?_

 _"I know how to get rid of the man with the white hair." Simon sang in the dark corridors of the yellow rabbit's brain. "Do as I say, and the dream will come back."_

 _Relieved, because Simon had been awfully quiet lately, the yellow rabbit slid back, among the moaning entrails of the old theatre from where he had been watching the man with white hair tinkering with Margarita._

 _Simon always knew what to do._

 _All the yellow rabbit had to do was obey._

 _And the dream…_

 _…_

 _…_

 _…would come back._


	47. Caller ID

Stepping around the mindlessly waddling form of Chica the Chicken and her cupcake or whatever the little eyeballed horror was supposed to be in the shadowy hallway, Spike entered the Security room, stooped, picked the receiver up off the hook and put the phone, which was on the floor, on speaker while eyeing the familiar number in the caller I.D display.

"Fazbear's Pizzaria. Wotcha want at this hour, phone guy?"

Ordinarily, Spike would have turned this into a break by flopping into the prolapsed remains of the office chair and propping his boots on the battered desk, but he and the chair parted ways last night when, still soggy, he'd awakened on the floor amidst the remains of the chair, struggling out of a nightmare where he was a small black child wearing a Fazbear's Pizzaria t-shirt being being stuffed into Freddy by the yellow rabbit so that the complex endoskeleton ripped him-her to bits as it clicked shut one joint at a time. Never one for half gestures, he'd also somehow managed to overturn the desk at the same time, ripping most of the monitors off the wall on his way down.

"Argle blargle urgh urgle, Frrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeedddddddddyyyyyyyyyy gurgle…"

Spike paused in the midst of pacing around the cramped space while fiddling with an unlit cigarette, "What the Hell?"

Frowning, he bent and turned up the volume. If it weren't for caller I.D. he might have figured he was he'd somehow getting a random call directly from the Hellmouth because it was lonely or whatever, or Drusilla was taunting him by strangling something large and tasty that she didn't feel like sharing. Which was ridiculous, because as far as he knew, Dru was still somewhere in Brazil, didn't know the phone guy, and didn't have this number, and anyway, the Hellmouth had other ways of communicating when it felt like it.

"Argle blargle ack ack ack rowlbleddddddd bleghhhhhhh."

The third option was that the _Grand Rialto's_ plumbing wished to discuss working conditions, and would he be interested in joining the Union it was forming?

"Helllllppppp meeeeeeee….I'mmmmmmmmm choooooookkkkkkkinnnnnggggggggg…"

"Bloody hell, come again? Oi, this is rich!" Thoroughly embracing his _Schadenfreunde_ because the normally annoyingly cheerfully man on the other end of the line who called every night from a different store in the chain to blatter happily at him was now obviously having a much shittier time than Spike. The vampire gave out a howling bark of laughter at the expense of the poor bastard badly in need of the Heimlich maneuver on the other end of the line.

"Hellllllllllpppppp…. Argh argh argh whOOP–akkkkkkkkkkk!"

"Keep it up mate!" Spike whooped from a bent-over position as he slapped the wall where the tatters of children's drawings still fluttered in all their Chica's Magic Rainbow Punch splattered glory, "And I do mean _keep it up!"_

"Arrrrrghhhgurgle…. Niiiiiiiiiiiiighhhhhhttttttt fooooouuuuurrrrrrrr – aaaaaak!" followed by a loud crash as if the phone guy had just pulled an entire automotive parts store down on himself.

"Oooooh, loverly! Now see if you can tip a Coke machine on yourself!" Spike added as in the sudden silence there came a tinkling that resolved itself into a badly worn music box rendition of "Carmine" and a slow, gurgling _basso profundo_ laugh that dissolved into a child's distorted voice, "You in time out, dawg! You stole my happy day…"

Click.

"Oh, eh?" Frowning, Spike crouched to face the button-studded phone and its attached answering machine.

 _…somewhere in the old theater the yellow rabbit whispered in the ear of Freddy while placing a grimy coffee cup in one of her clumsy paws before wrapping something around the other, reminding her of lost days and stolen fun, of the man with white hair who took all the magic away, stealing Freddy's friends so that she would never again rap with Bobby, the curly dark-haired boy in the wheelchair who was the best human beat box ever, of Hailey the little blonde girl who knew the best clapping games, of Michael who knew the name of all the Turtles and let her be Leonardo because Leonardo was the coolest Turtle… "Make him pay!" the yellow rabbit whispered, "Make him pay, fifty dollars every day…my mother asked me to pick the very best one and I. Pick. YOU!"_


	48. Carmen

"Now that's somethin' you don't hear every night." Spike leaned back on his hands where he now sat on the scuffed floor beside the phone. As the receiver clicked on the other end, he noticed the flashing red light on the answering machine.

Leaning forward, he pushed the button next to it.

There was a tone, followed by the phone guy's annoyingly cheerful voice from 3 days before if the date/time stamp was in any way accurate: "Hello? Hello? Hey you're doing great! Most people don't last this long. I mean, you know, they usually move on to other things by now. I'm not implying that they died…"

Smirking, Spike leaned forward and sped through the message. He released the button, and the annoying one resumed, presumably on night four: "Hello? Hello? Hey! Hey, wow, day four! I knew you could do it!"

The vampire absently lipped a cigarette out of the pack before shoving it back into his uniform pocket, "Uh, hey, listen… I may not be around to send you a message tomorrow. (banging noise) It's… it's… It's been a bad night her for me. Ummmmm, I-I'm kinda glad that I recorded my messages for you (clears throat…) Uh, when I did."

Hang on there! Did he hear something in the background?

Spike cut the recording off and rewound it back to just a few seconds before the throat clearing.

No. Missed it.

Rewind.

Replay.

Bang, no, ah! There… he carefully played it back yet again, head cocked, eyes closed in concentration…

He was right, there, in-between the idiot who loved the sound of his own voice soon to be strangled, flattened, whatever, and the banging noise was the unmistakable sound of a child yawning and what sounded like a music box that somebody had taken a hammer to giving off its final death rattle.

Bizet's "Carmen".

Now, wasn't that _interesting!_

Spike leaned once more over the answering machine and pushed the play button as overhead in one of the surviving monitors, Freddy's grinning face slowly rose into full frame before the monitor went blank.

Followed by another.

And yet another…

 _The yellow rabbit found that the guards, who had died all to easily to have been of any use to Simon as little more than light appetizers, were willing to listen as Simon told him what to say._

 _Backs would be turned._

 _Ears would be deaf._

 _Simon said it had to be that way._

 _Simon was always right._


	49. Acid

A monitor went black.

Spike was too busy mentally putting pieces together to notice – things hadn't quite felt right from the get go.

A monitor went black.

Things had tried to kill him.

Nothing so odd there – when a lad lives, no, _dies_ on the run, lookin' for a thrill, that's part of the fun right?

Right!

A monitor went black.

And when a lad decides to get back at somebody what badly deserves getting back at while making a bit of cash (as of yet uncollected) at the same time, stirring up the muck at the bottom of Karma is just part of the collateral damage one creates in order to things done.

Dead right there, mate!

A monitor went black.

But still...

Something moved behind Spike, something _large._

The lights went out.

"Bloody hell," The scent enveloping him in the darkness was familiar, dank, carrion, stale. "Oh dear. Oh dearie, _dearie_ dear, whatever shall I _do?"_ Spike almost-sang mockingly, hands flexing, _"_ Either Sunnydale's having a highly selective power-out tonight, or something nasty wants to kill me, I-am-oh-so-quakin'-in-me _boots_!"

Teeth bared and fists ready, Spike pivoted, and then screamed as something cold and wet hit him square in the face followed by a blow which sent him flying into the now dark monitors, face hissing and bubbling.

In the doorway, Mike and Jeremy silently high-fived before walking away to the theme of _Carmen_ as played by a broken music box.

 _Maggie, Simon told the yellow rabbit, is the key._


	50. In Hot Water

If Spike thought his game of Slap and Tickle with Glory supplying the slap and bloody little tickle, had been agonizing, he'd been wrong.

Dead wrong.

Dead wrong as in, "Stake me now, I'll supply the stake!"

Curling in on himself in agony, Spike writhed, screaming as the blinding sulfuric acid Freddy splashed him with ate into his face and then his hands as he clawed at where his eyes had been. The grotty brown bear grabbed him by one ankle, dragging him like a broken toy out of the arcing remains of the last of the monitors in Security and out into the hall, the fire alarm and Bizet's "Carmen" echoing in his ears, the gonging boom of a broken Grandfather clock striking every hour at once as counterpoint.

 _The yellow rabbit had a little chat with Vinnie._

 _He mentioned that the man with white hair was not Vinnie's friend._

 _He mentioned that Maggie, if the man with white hair had his way, would be taken away from Vinnie._

 _Forever._

 _And that Vinnie might want to stop the man with white hair._

 _Freddy would be quite happy to help._

 _Yes, she would._

 _She would indeed._

 _Near full to bursting, Simon prepared himself for the best part of any meal – desert._

 _Simon always had room for desert._

The vampire's head banged off the side of the doorway, hard, adding a roaring in his ears to the burning in his face and hands.

He had to get away,

Some way.

Somehow.

Bumping along the carpet over concrete floor, Spike managed to straighten despite the agony of his face. Groping blindly, he grabbed with both raw hands what fell like one of the sweaty exposed pipes along the base of the wall and hung on hard so that the animatronic dragging him jerked to an abrupt halt, yanking his hip out of socket.

The hot water pipe, part of the old theater's overworked digestive system was slippery as he pulled, trying to ignore the new pain, yanking the electronic obscenity backwards, tipping it sideways so that it stepped on his other leg, breaking it below the knee with a wet "snap" before falling against the wall with a thudding electronic screech. In an avalanche of broken plaster it fell, landing on Spike in a clawing, thrashing heap.

Screaming, Spike jerked at the pipe again so that it groaned, pulling out of the wall in a gritty mildewed puff of dust against his raw face.

The pipe separated, spraying Spike with scalding liquid. With a yelp he pushed himself out of the way so that the stream hopefully hit his attacker.

There was a loud sizzling noise and the thing began to flail on top of him, the crackling of shorting wire and burning phake phun phurr mingling with the sound of water escaping drowning out Spike's labored breathing in his own ears as he dragged himself out from under the writhing Freddy, curling up beside the dying animatronic in a fetal position in the hot water.

 _Freddy had fallen._

 _Nonetheless, Simon was pleased._

 _You can't have a war without collateral damage._

 _And Freddy was collateral._

 _No matter. No worry._

 _It was all good: the world bred many Freddys._

 _Even the tall man would do, uncooperative as he usually was._

 _All Simon needed was the right goad._

 _But there was time for that later if things came to that._

 _The short, sloppy one, was useless._

 _Vinnie, the chattering fox child, on the other hand, was._

 _The yellow rabbit stepped over the man with white hair where he lay sobbing and rockng in the growing pool of hot water, to remind Vinnie of what the man with white hair intended to do with Maggie unless..._

 _...stopped._


	51. Door Number Three

Panting, Spike dragged himself sightlessly towards what he hoped was the employee lounge, fingers groping high and low for familiar landmarks, legs trailing uselessly behind him.

There was the stack of broken chairs shoved to the side he was always catching his shins on.

That had to be the floor polisher, too big to go into a closet and reeking of stale pizza, mildew, and spilled Chica's Magic Rainbow wossit.

That might have been that oversized bale of paper napkins left out that the mice had got in to…

Leaving oozy hand prints on the walls, Spike pulled himself up on his one good knee, groping randomly past what felt like a light switch… ah-ha! He'd found the pull down fire alarm a few feet from the door to the employee lounge. If he kept going that way he'd… a spasm of pain from his broken leg caused him to crumple, fingers catching on the pull-down, which began to howl, adding to the din of the smoke detector in Security

As Jeremy and Mike watched expressionlessly from the smoky shadows cast by the emergency lights, love's bitch dragged himself into the lounge by his elbows in a grotesque parody of a low-crawl— over there was what felt like the broken Grandfather clock.

One door.

Two doors.

With a crash Spike pulled a chair onto himself in his blind search. He pushed it aside only to collide headfirst with one of the steel legs of the battered old kitchen table in the center of the room, his own catching on what might have been the edge of the vending machine, the pain causing him to curl in on himself retching until he collected himself enough to pull away.

What he needed should be about five feet that way if he remembered right.

 _YES!_ Door number three – "And what prize does our lucky boy get, Vanna?"

Mumbling under his breath Spike aimed his upper body so that it fell heavily against the door to the employee changing room and shower, ("Why, Pat me ol' mate, this lucky lad gets a…) the heavy wooden panel rebounding off the wall with a loud bang, slamming into him in it's abrupt return with an equally loud bang. (…lovely great big smack on the head – bloody hell, that soddin' hurt!)

Gasping, Spike forcefully shouldered the heavy wooden panel aside, tearing it from its hinges so that it landed on the tiles with a loud clatter.

Dragging himself over the fallen door, Spike, no longer breathing because it required too much effort, eased himself into the shower area, accidentally pulling the cheap vinyl curtain down on himself in a rattle of equally cheap plastic rings, scrabbling up the slick tiles until his fingers connected with first one knob and then the other, turning what he hoped was the cold one as far as it would go in a sudden downpour of icy water.

Tittering, Spike leaned rocking against the back wall of the stall, raising his still-sizzling face and hands into the painful relief, letting the water wash away the remaining battery acid. Bloody hell, but those damned ugly toys played rough – not content with blinding him and crippling him, good ol' Freddles had slugged him with a rosary wrapped around one catcher's mitt paw if he was any judge.

Nevertheless, wotta rush, mate, wotta _RUSH!_

 _Inelda Schnelz sat upstairs at her kitchen table, smoke curling up around her in delicate wisps from between the floorboards, the smoke detector over the stove joining the general clamor downstairs in a shrieking duet, looking up at the framed leftovers of a feast that had been neither good nor bad, waiting._


	52. Heartburn

_In addition to bad plumbing, it now seemed that the Grand Rialto had heartburn._

 _As the flames from Security traveled up the wall and on to the fire resistant drop ceiling which now flowed in fiery cascades to the floor, some of the more adventurous flames decided to explore the air conditioning ducts, loudly crackling with delight over the delicious piles of old programs and forgotten bales of still-folded popcorn boxes as cans of paint, indignant at their rest in forgotten corners being disturbed, swelled in outrage, their pique spattering around them in burning outrage, their Krylon siblings following suit, detonating with dull thuds, giving up their delicious propellants to the gluttonous fire so that it raced greedily into the wall spaces in search of more dainties, the rats and mice running ahead of it._

 _The Grand Rialto's dyspeptic inner workings joined the general rumpus, overhead pipes rattling and clattering as the water inside began to boil. Groaning, the gas main complained at having been awakened even as flames leapt joyously over the heaps of discarded asbestos theater curtains and straight for the stacks of forgotten celluloid features in their cans, exclaiming greedily as a burning Chica mindlessly wandered through the growing conflagration, fuzz blackening and melting away from the top down, revealing her intricate titanium skull inch by burning inch._

Surrounded by rising billows of dirty smoke, Imelda Schnelz sat serene in her old kitchen chair, drinking coffee from a cup that read "#1 Husband".

It wouldn't be long now.


	53. Potty

_Eyes closed, face rapt, yellow rabbit and his passenger stood in the lounge, listening to the water run._

 _Though delicious, Freddy's attack on the man with white hair wasn't enough to bring the dream back._

 _Simon whispered into the ear of the fox-child._

 _It didn't take much, this pouring of poison._

 _Sometimes, all it takes is little reminder of the truth._

 _Truth kills._

 _Even when the victim is already dead._

The water pouring down the remains of Spike's face suddenly turned scalding. Screaming, he threw himself sideways out of the stream and onto the tiles – the very air he moved through a whip on exposed nerves as something who stank of carrion, electricity and dust wordlessly hauled him upright so that the bones in his broken leg ground together, and pulled a blade thorough his guts from where abs became ribs in a single, efficient upwards slice, sending him flying with a kick.

Landing heavily, the stink of his violated body and the smoke of a dying building filling his senses as he tried to hold his entrails in, Spike felt himself yanked violently backwards in the small space by steel cables that writhed and bit, only to send him flying so that he fell through what felt like the door of the toilet stall, breaking the toilet off the wall in a crash of broken porcelain and a sudden gush of hot, dirty water. Whatever it was pulled him up by the remains of his uniform shirt, slamming him again and again against the floor, making his spine groan and his ribs slide around as his hip slipped back into it's socket. Finally able to move on that side, he kicked painfully outwards, trying to get enough leverage to escape, boot going through the wall, as whatever it was attacking him, skidded in the torrent of filth.

 _The old theater groaned, guts sluicing, veins hemorrhaging, convulsing in it's death throes as the former Mayor's pride and joy, ignored by a city council that didn't understand the artful ballet of the delicate balance in a land of earthquakes and drought, joined the dance of spitting wires and groaning gas pipes._

 _Inelda's chair slowly tipped forward beneath its own weight as the brightly burning floorboards submitted to gravity. Eyes closed, she contentedly sipped her coffee from this new angle, savoring its bitterness._

 _Yes, indeed, it would be over soon._


	54. Ashtray

_As the Mangle and Foxy the Pirate played games with their new toy, Mike watched empty-eyed from the doorway, remembering his letters._

 _Letters to family._

 _Letters to friends._

 _Letters painfully scrawled on scraps of paper, single words taking days to write, leaving him exhausted in the building which trapped him – filched change dropped in pockets to pay for stamps when stamps weren't pilfered from the business office._

 _Letters tucked into the man with white hair's pockets in the hopes that somebody, anybody would see them, letting the world know he'd once existed._

 _Letters to a girl he'd been too ashamed to speak to directly when he had the chance._

 _Ashamed of his failure, of injuring his back in some stupid, random accident, destroying a career he'd so carefully built, he'd walked past her in silence the day his discharge became official._

 _Phones picked up, a number dialed, put back on the hook when he heard her answer even after death silenced him. Too ashamed of what he'd become, of taking shit jobs because nobody wants a man with a bad back, but even more ashamed to give up completely. Letters written but never sent._

 _But still trying._

 _Still trying._

 _Of watching those painfully written letters torn up, to blow down the alleyway with others unsent in the man with white hair's pockets, with him unable to tell him what was needed._

 _The building groaned, shelves toppling as the floor began to subside, water from broken pipes weighing it down as hidden wounds from seventy years or more of earthquakes, of heat, of cold, of dry, of damp where only the rats went taking their toll as the fire department stood outside in the dark, watching the death of a building too dangerous, too trivial to save except to ensure that it didn't take it's newer, more valuable neighbors with it._

 _The gas main had been turned off as the building crackled and popped, paint cans and light bulbs applauding for performers long dead as the last of the celluloid dreams came tumbling down in what had once been a temple for the likes of Clara Bow, Charlie Chaplain, and Vivian Leigh while cartoon rabbits and foxes and bears walked through the burning dreams, guitar strings snapping, eyes fixed as a clock burst into flames in the heat, heavy pendulum crashing unheard to the floor, the glass fronting it cracking in the heat to the laughter of children and burning confetti - the workroom rising in flames, filth washing across the floor, the growing weight pulling all downwards into the earth._

 _Jeremy watched as indifferently as he had lived, his own letters undelivered – no one had looked for him, body stuffed negligently into a cartoon dog's – as somewhere on a shelf the head of that dog started to smoke in the heat, polyester phun phurr shriveling, beading at the tips, baring the delicate titanium struts that had closed in on his face, killing him. Edges smoldering, curling in on themselves like so much burning paper, Jeremy looked at Mike and shrugged in a trail of cigarette ash, eyes a feverish after-image as the long-dried blood that had been his anchor in this apathetic little hell blackened and charred, and then was no more - ash rising in the chimney that the theater had become._

 _Pausing long enough to aim an unfelt kick at the man with white hair where he lay gasping in the muck, Mike followed, eyes closed, face rapt, edges bright, so much twirling burning paper as the shabby hand of a pink and white bear fell burning to the floor, twisting in on itself into the shape of a human heart from the heat, following Jeremy, letters forgotten even as smiling, cradling her coffee cup, Inelda Schnelz and her chair plummeted heavily through the burning floor above._


	55. Royal Flush

Realizing his own flammability, Spike curled in on himself in the sludge covered floor of the employee restroom as his attackers punted him back and forth, going limp even as he held himself together so that he didn't antagonize them into anything genuinely whimsical like play jump rope with his loose intestines.

Around them _The Grand Rialto_ groaned like the _Titanic_ going down, water from broken pipes sluicing across the buckling floor so that it steamed, hissing and bubbling like ice tossed on a short order grill.

Kick – ribs caved in one one side, he was sent skidding through a patch of sharp, broken porcelain.

Kick – he bounced off of a wall, a sink landing beside him, more broken porcelain, collarbone breaking.

Kick – hurled through the door and out into the hallway, landing in a huddle, ears ringing. The heat swirled around him in the darkness of his own head as _The Grand Rialto_ groaned, in a rattle of broken plaster and smoking lathe.

And then… it …stopped…

Spike played dead, curled in upon himself, one arm over his head for what felt like forever, the death throes of a dying dream thumping through his bones.

They'd… gone… away…

Cautiously Spike raised himself to one elbow, ruined face blindly turning from side to side to side, trying to sense if this was just a new game on their part or if he was finally alone.

No more kicks came to send him flying down the hall.

He rolled over on his back and started to pull himself back to the lounge and the back door, fighting the current as the floor buckled beneath him in a cascade of water and raw sewage, only to halt when the doorway to the lounge collapsed, blocking his escape.

The only other way out was the workshop and the loading dock.

Spike changed his course. If he could get out through the loading dock, he could grope his way to the nearby manhole and safety.

 _The yellow rabbit watched the man with white hair drag himself across the steaming, heaving floor in search of another way out._

 _The yellow rabbit was furious._

 _How could the boy disappoint him when all of this was for him? For his little brother and sister?_

 _How could the Day be rebuilt if the boy didn't finish what he'd started?_

 _How could it all be made right without the cause of the problem eliminated?_

 _How?_

 _Simon, glutted, could care less._

 _Still, the gangrenous animating spirit, schadenfreude satiated to the point of deliciously indifferent indigestion, could be obliging to one who had been so very useful._

 _As Foxy the Pirate and the Mangle silently threaded their way hand in hook through the holocaust towards the workshop, Simon released the yellow rabbit._

 _There was always room for one more cookie._

The stench of rotting meat drowning out the hot, dry reek of the dying building, Spike felt himself suddenly picked up off the floor, to be hurled through the air.

Snarling, "I don't have soddin' time for this!" as he landed face-down in the sludge, love's bitch waited for whatever it was to come close enough for him to grapple with, maybe even kill so he could continue making his escape through the workshop.

It walked around him, grabbing him by the back of his cheap polyester work shirt, yanking him upright.

Leg grinding, one good arm trying to keep his private contents from spilling all over the place, Spike bonelessly bided his time as he felt himself turned this way and that until…

…he pulled his new attacker toward him in a nasty mass of dirty fake fur. Trapping his innards against this newest enemy so that the two of them went down flailing, Spike wrapped himself around the yellow rabbit with a snarl so that the two of them writhed across the slowly collapsing floor of the old small town movie palace, tumbling them downwards in a cascade of hot bricks and dirty water as the Mayor's intricate puzzle of plumbing joined the dance, erupting through the floor, hastening the theater's collapse into a burning wet maelstrom.

The yellow rabbit, suddenly abandoned by Simon who was in need of a long nap, screeched, writhing in Spike's grip as they tumbled into the main sewer beneath, blue-white sparks flying out in all directions as the force holding him together dissipated, the dream forgotten.

Pushing the rapidly disintagrating remains of Mr. Afton from him Spike surfaced, rolling over on his back in the darkness, allowing the current to carry him downstream through Sunnydale's complex bowels before flushing him out into the desert that a rogue Jesuit originally shaped Sunnydale from in his quest for eternity.

"Bloody hell!" was Spike's last thought as he passed out on a sandbar, "If this is work, I would have soddin' applied a long time ago!"


	56. La Bamba

Vinnie Afton, forever a creature of motion and impulse, led Maggie by the hand through the burning workshop in a trail of bloody footprints, remembering an evening before his cousin's _Quinceanera_.

The back yard had been lit up like a stage by shop lights after sundown. At his mother's insistence he and his brothers and sisters had all been learning how to dance so that they wouldn't embarrass her in front of the more traditional side of the family on his pretty cousin's big day.

Some Vinnie already knew; every now and then _abuelita_ , granny who lived a block over, had tried in vain to teach them to him and his mob of younger siblings on long Sunday afternoons after Mass and a big family lunch. Straightening to his full height, Vinnie stamped and posed his way through the opening of _La Bamba_ towards where Maggie sat sketching, arms at his sides, feet clattering on the pavers in time to the music, one of his sister's jump ropes coiled around his waist in the one dance he knew by heart.

The world his drum, he'd presented himself to her on one knee, hand out invitingly, a big goofy grin on his face, bottle red hair falling over his eyes.

Maggie, not one to participate when she could watch, actually took it.

Blushing, the gangly boy led her out into the center of the patio to the applause of his family, showing her the steps as they went.

Hesitant, Maggie gained confidence so that by the time he'd signaled to her that he wanted her to take the end of the jump rope so that he could spin away from her, uncoiling it a long tail, she knew what she needed to do.

In a burst of static, the back yard with it's improvised lighting disappeared, leaving them two ragged figures. She, a grotesque three-legged, two-headed monstrosity. He, a shop-worn parody of a fox pretending to be a pirate: both merging into the graceful animatronics the neighbor across the street created from Maggie's sketches so very long ago.

To the tune of _La Bamba_ as sung by the quetzal bird on her shoulder, Margarite the white fox displaying for admiration her pink and white skirts and elaborately embroidered apron with one dainty paw, coquettish fan in the other, tucking a daisy behind one ear as Vincente, tall in his fine white linen suit with a red scarf fluttering around his neck and new straw hat stacattoed around her, legs pistons on the hot concrete, Margarite uncoiling a red silk sash from around his waist as he spun, steering her closer and closer to Spike's crate.

His neighbor's finest unseen creations maneuvered the dropped sash with their feet into a knot, the blood rune Simon had taught his father to make inside their metal skulls animating them, trapping them as _The Grand Rialto_ tore itself to pieces, finishing to wild applause among the _luminarias_ and fireflies.

Bowing, Vincente stole a boy's kiss from Margarite, shoving her into the box which could only hold one, slamming it shut, so that it thudded backwards out onto the cracked cement edge of the back loading dock and into the alley.

Heat shriveling the remains of his gaudy red pelt so that it exposed his titanium skeleton, Vinnie Afton, trapped by the boundaries of the building, by his father's spell, stepped back into the workroom turned furnace, watching the hose dragging firefighters as they run around Maggie's crate, wetting down the surrounding buildings.

 _The Grand Rialto's_ roof collapsed, taking the ragged fox boy with eyes like two old brass coins and the memory of one perfect evening with it.


	57. Morning Rush

Taking a shortcut around four in the morning, Buffy walked through the alley past the still smoking shell of _The Grand Rialto_ , the dust from patrolling in her hair mingled with the ingrained stench of fast food grease.

Wondering if a firefighter made more than a grill cook or at least had better hours, the Slayer spared the charred ruin a glance,

No, people did stupid things, like drag firefighters out of bed because they'd set their own beds alight with careless cigarettes or ignited the curtains while messing around with hairspray and lighters.

At least Doublemeat Palace was predictable. And, she made extra by showing up at four thirty a.m. to sling tray after tray of frozen biscuit dough and raw cinnamon rolls into the oven in the back of the corporate factory kitchen, to be pulled out in time for the morning rush.

"Not my monkeys. Not my circus."

With a dismissive gesture Buffy stepped over the smashed remains of a coffee cup and onto the sidewalk, the lights of Doublemeat Palace harshly illuminating the block ahead of her.


	58. Invitation and Aftermath

Two days later after having fed off of whatever scavenger his injured body attracted until he was strong enough to drag himself from under the derelict Model T washed up on the bank of the Ruidoso by some ancient flash flood back into Sunnydale and his crypt, Spike sprawled healing in his malodorous easy chair watching _Temptations_ , nursing a beer, cigarette a long column of ash between his fingers.

His vision was still a little wonky, but it was hard to miss the soiled piece of paper someone or _something_ slipped under his door before fleeing.

During a commercial for some sort of newamazingmagicwondermiracle soap (dish or clothing), Earth-friendly or otherwise (Who cares? We're all gonna die sooner or later!), he got up, tossing the empty and the butt aside, and limped over to where the note languished to retrieve it.

The note was left unread atop his fridge for quite a while.

At nightfall, while emptying his fifth blood bag, Spike bothered to unfold it.

On it was an address and a time in Inelda Schnelz's crabby handwriting.

Spike, smirking around an unlit butt, sniggered. "So, the old baghag survived the simultaneous fire and flood after all."

Aaaaaaaand, oh my my _my_ , she wanted HIM to drop by for a little VISIT. He lit up, exhaling in a long, thin blue stream, "Oh dearie dear, how utterly, revoltingly civilized of you, Mrs. _Smelz - s_ od off, you old cow."

He crumpled the request, dropping it to the floor, kicking it beneath the fridge on his way back to his throne in front of the idiot box, happy to be an idiot for the duration. At least until his face stopped aching as the skin twitched and heaved itself back into place over the bridge of his nose where the battery acid had burned it away.

Well, maybe he WOULD.

Maybe he WOULDN'T.

Anyway, she owed him a week's wages.

So, he would.

Probably.

Maybe.

 _Perhaps._


	59. Berlin

Skinny arms akimbo on broad hips and pot belly, Schnelz stood waiting for him in the late glow of twilight on the remains of the theater's back loading dock, hunched forward atop her skinny, heavily veined legs, gnarled fists on hips, broad, ugly head thrust forward following the lead of her aggressive, stubbly bulldog chin topped by her usual garish harlequin glasses on an equally gaudy chain.

She snorted dismissively at his approach.

Spike, in the mood to antagonize her, hell, anybody he encountered, turned his leather-clad back to her as he hitched himself up on to the warm, blackened concrete, pulling out his hip flask, fags and lighter; taking his own sweet time to light up in between loud, gulping pulls at the Bourbon his flask held.

As the sky darkened and the stars came out, one by one, starting with Venus, followed by Mars, ending with Orion, she ponderously lowered herself down beside him, a rhinoceros parking itself on a Lazy Boy recliner but without the grace.

"So, what do you do when you're the big fat ugly daughter of a south side Chicago Jewish tailor that everybody takes for a man in drag and no boy in his right mind would be seen in public with? Someone who was called Inelda SMELLS on the playground? You go into show business, kid, you head straight for Hollywood." She said in her usual wet, gravelly rasp.

Spike, lighting one butt from another, turned where he sat and stared at the dragon of the _Rialto_ , who wryly continued, "That's where I met Hermann, doin' extra work. You know, show up, be part of a crowd in front of the camera, get paid – or do they do that any more? Anyway, he thought I was a man. I thought he was a woman. I made a pass. He made a pass. We wound up gropin' in the backseat of a taxi. That's when he realized I weren't no guy. That's when I realized he weren't no doll and that under that raised hemline was strictly kosher beans and franks. But he was ok with it, he says, "Inelda, _bubblah_ , you look like a man. I look like a woman. I'm a fairy, you're, ehhhhhh, whatever you are – let's make it legal and make a go of it big time!"

She stared at the scorched brick wall of the coffee shop that backed The Grand Rialto, traffic a distant murmur before she held out one gnarled talon, knuckles swollen with arthritis, the tattooed number on her forearm quietly there. Wordlessly, Spike handed her his pack and lighter.

"I prefer matches, easier on the hands." Schnelz knocked a fag out of the pack, tamped it on the concrete and put it in her mouth – Spike lit it for her. She took a long, deep drag before contemplatively releasing it in a series of diminishing rings, adding. "That's when we realized Hollywood wasn't big enough for us, so we went to Europe - we was a sensation." She took the fag from Spike's hand, and took a long, thoughtful drag, adding, "Ehhhh… who am I kiddin'? Sort of."

"By then, we was professional ballroom dancers – the tango, mostly. Can you believe they used to pay people to do that? But it wasn't enough – even with me makin' all Hermann's gowns and doin' my own tailoring. Pick a few pockets here, a few pockets there, work whatever shows was cookin, private parlor lessons' – I even did costumes – that was Paris, but I never did no couture work in the design houses – didn't have the fancy trainin' and certificates but as my papa used to say, "Show me a gown, _kätzchen_ , and I'll make it for you - wholesale!" So my Hermann always had the best even when he had to put on a pair of trousers and work as a set carpenter so we could afford our daily bread!"

She continued, eyes distant behind thick tri-focal lenses, "After a while, Paris wasn't big enough for us, even with Josephine Baker there." She laughed, grating sound that ended in a cough.

"My _God_ , that WOMAN! She showed up one summer night at our favorite jazz club in only a fur coat and a diamond ankle bracelet– her and me, we go up to me and Hermann's room across the street. When she realized I wasn't a man or was I? she said, "La di dah!" and when Hermann walked in on us an hour later, he dropped his dress and all she said was, "Any more where that came from?" Yeah, Josephine– better than Frieda when we tried to make a go of it in Mexico City in '39!"

Spike had to agree there: he'd had his own turn on Josephine's dance card. If Dru hadn't have thrown a fit when she caught them making like salt and pepper in a _pissoir_ near the base of the Eiffel Tower and broken it up out of sheer spite because Josephine wasn't her idea but _his_. Spike would have Sired la Baker on the _spot_. As for Kahlo, unibrows were a deal breaker, Leftists were boring, and her art pretentious. Anyway, Mexican always gave him heartburn.

Inelda continued around a second fag. "Paris wasn't big enough for us, and the gendarmes was on to our little pick-pocket racket whenever work was scarce. So after I socks Hemingway in the eye for calling my sweet Hermann a queer? "Oh, my _gindeleh_ , my dainty doe, but I AM!" was all my Hermann said afterwards, "You may be the only, ahem, _woman_ in my life, but _schatzi_ , sweetie, I am the queerest queer of all queers, and proud of it!" Ernie, the big macho sissy started crying right there in front of everyone when I let him know what I thought about what he called my _bubblah_ – and that a doll blacked his eye! (Spike nodded in agreement. Hemingway had been a disappointment: all show and no dog— even if he wrote like a god… a constipated god with hemorrhoids.) After that we hoofs it to Berlin."

"Yeah, Berlin." Spike smiled inwardly, "Despite being full of Germans? Paradise! (or so I've heard)."

Schnelz shot him a suspicious look before exclaiming, "Gawd, yes! Prostitutes lined the streets. There was ones who'd beat you to order, there was ones who wore big boots to trample you with: pissers, shitters, hairy men in frocks, pretty men as women, pretty women as men, women as women, men as men, half beavers, geese, grannies, you name it – you could even make a phone call and have whatever you wanted DELIVERED to your doorstep like they does pizzas now; it was all one big party, with us two for the price of one!"

Yeah, mate, Berlin in the 1930s had been brill. The street scene had been a great way for him and Drusilla to pick up a quick meal and quicker cash as long as the cash wasn't useless German marks. All the two of them had to do was stand out on some corner, any corner after sundown, and some rich fool would invite them into their car for a bit of slap and tickle in the rumble seat, or better yet, back home in the family parlor... things were so fast and loose at the time that like a lot of demons, they didn't even bother concealing what they were: fangs in, fangs out, whatever the customer wanted – and fangs got you more money, even a weekend in the country!

"But all parties has to end. Before we could get out, I wound up with a pink triangle and a yellow star stitched to my coat, and Hermann, well, Hermann couldn't get away when they came to get us before we could flee to Paris, to Hollywood, anywhere but Germany – I went to Bergen-Belsen – what save me was tailoring uniforms for officers and the fact that some doctor discovered I was a man – they was inside my body the whole time! – I was an oddity he wanted to preserve for his future "Museum of Degenerate Subhumans!" Anyways, my Hermann was sent to Auschwitz. Gawd knows what he did to survive – we didn't see each other until years later when he found me through the Red Cross in a DP camp, serial number tattoo and all.

So, we comes back to Hollywood. I became a stuntman, I say man because nobody ever suspected that under all that padding and harness was a woman's or whatever's body that was too big and clumsy to be anything else. By the time someone figured it out years later, nobody cared – we was too old. Hermann talked me into coming home with him to Sunnydale. He'd inherited this building from his ol' man, Herr Rosenberg."

This was too delicious to let pass, Spike smirked around the fag he was lighting, "Rosenberg? I know a Rosenberg… Anyway, I thought you said your last name was "Schnelz".

Inelda snorted, "I was the one wearing trousers the day we made it legal so he took my last name. My Hermann became Mrs. Harriet Schnelz. It worked – so what if I was born both?" Spike stared at her, almost dropping his cigarette. "Didn't you hear me the first time? Clean out your ears, _boychik!_ Anyway, after having six boys, ol' lady Schnelz wanted a girl. So, snip snip, little Master What'sit became little Miss What'sit !" She laughed at the expression on Spike's face ending in another long, wet cough, "Nobody asked, nobody respectable, that is. Hermann had a nephew, Ira, who married some well-meaning kook of a USC Sunnydale "Women's Studies" professor with red hair. To show solidarity, they invited us to their daughter's _Bat Mitzvah_ where we embarrassed 'em because we already knew what we was and didn't need them to join our cause – haven't seen 'em since. You're about the right age, how's the kid doin'? Smart, but t.i.m.i.d.!"

"We've, heh, _met_ …" All but howling and slapping his knee inside at the mental image of the cynically flamboyant Herman and Inelda showing up to Willow's Bat Mitzvah in full drag, Spike tried unsuccessfully to hide his laughter in a long pull at his flask so that it came out in a long, erratic snort, "…in passing." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve thinking, "Oh God, if Willow ever bothers to ask, I can say with complete confidence that her preferred style of dance partner doesn't so much run in the family as gallop down Main Street blowing a trumpet in Jimmy Choo stillettos and a rainbow sequin jockstrap with matching unicorn horn!"

"Anyways," Inelda continued, ""It won't be so bad," he sez, "It's a quiet place, the building has an apartment over the theater – the one I grew up in. We two aging fairies can live there, show some shows, and scandalize the good people of Sunnydale by walkin' 'round like the Berlin whores we is whenever things get boring.""

Obviously Hermann had never heard about the Hellmouth under his boyhood home or he wouldn't have said that… unless he'd been a master of understatement, something Spike highly doubted.

"'Bout then cancer caught up with Hermann – prostate, _of course!_ The most feminine creature I knows dies of a male cancer? But my _bubblah_ was like that! So I've lived here, ever since, taking care of Hermann's building, renting it out, wearing his dresses, and remembering what it felt like to be walking the streets of Berlin with the love of my life hanging off my arm after paying a visit to some rich bastard, lipstick all smeared."

"Love of your life? My ass!" Spike snarled, bitterly remembering how fast things had gone downhill on greased skis only to be greeted at the bottom by a direct lightning strike in regards to the first love of his life, Dru, and then Buffy, the real thing.

Ignoring Spike, Inelda gestured at the still standing enclosed stairs to her apartment, "Before I forget, dispose of my body at the bottom of what's left of the back stairs to my apartment. Door's locked, but the keys are still in the drawer on the right side of what's left of my desk, unless you already swiped 'em – I seen you snooping." Her outline blurred, growing taller, more masculine.

"What?" Spike rubbed at his eyes, which didn't help. He'd always noticed a faint stink about the back alley, but had put it down to the used cooking oil collection tank nearby. Obviously the two closed doors had trapped most of the pong.

Inelda flapped a negligent hand dismissively. "I had a heart attack on my way to work a month ago. Fell ass over teakettle down my apartment stairs - broke my neck. Don't worry, I was dead before I hit the bottom – you get the job because you was the only one who can handle nasty things when ordered to." Inelda said as she continued fading, "The fact that you handled my Uncle Jacob – my mother's brother, may he rise on the Day all toothpicks inside, IS proof enough! He was family, but a real shit, that one. Back in Berlin, that stinker betrayed me and my Hermann to the Gestapo to save his own ass. That, and he must have made a deal with something, he never aged a day until you scraped him up with a shovel for me! Anyway, after you've disposed of my rotten carcass, maybe put me on my Herman's grave, I don't know, you'll get your paycheck, cash, whatever. While I'm at it, there's two envelopes on my desk in the business office addressed to Willow Rosenberg and friend. If they ain't ash, be a good boy and drop 'em in the nearest mailbox for me, will you? Already stamped and everything - so no problem!"

Puzzled, Spike stared at Inelda's slowly dissipating but now unmistakably masculine form in the yellow glare of the street lamp at the mouth of the alley, "But you rented… to him… anyway?"

Inelda's outline shrugged, "Family is family, business is business!" and with a wave of a fedora, he was gone.


	60. An Ending of Sorts

The crate that the Mangle was pushed into wound up going where Spike intended anyway.

After six months spent floating around in Customs limbo, at least one rebel encampment of one sort or another, a goat pen,and a cantina, it finally arrived at the Finn's current HQ (a small three room hotel on the outskirts of Ciudad de Guatemala, the national capital) where it sat unopened for another two months due to the Mr. and Mrs. Riley Finns being out in the field eliminating something nastier than they for pay.

Once opened, the C.O.D. delivery immediately attacked the Mr. and Mrs. Riley Finns, repeatedly demanding in a child's voice, "I belong to FazCorp Entertainment Group. Please return me at once to (address withheld upon the request of FazCorp Entertainment Group)!" resulting in the complete destruction of the Mr. and Mrs. Riley Finn's hotel room, their entire set of matching luggage and contents, several ugly wedding gifts, and the total nervous breakdown of a large feral pig named Julio, who lived under the back steps.

Once the destruction of the room and most of the building was complete, the homicidal animatronic did a three-legged slithering march out of the rubble, through the surrounding barrios and into the jungle, going due Northwest where rumors of a steel demon with two heads and three legs could be traced well into Mexico. After unintentionally founding several new religions, it was found standing, battery depleted, roughly in the vicinity of Salina Cruz in the state of Oaxaca, loudly demanding to be returned to FazCorp.

The Finn's luggage was eventually replaced, but not the dirty laundry it contained. The C.O.D. fees as well as the cost of the damage to the hotel was covered by the entire cash payment they had received earlier for services rendered in the Guatemalan jungle, their cell phones, and an unopened carton of Marlboro Lights.

Not long after _The Grand Rialto_ caught fire, there was a minor uproar following the discovery of a desecrated grave in Sunnydale's historic Jewish Union Cemetery. The grave belonged to (name withheld at the request of surviving family members), and had been dug up and something large buried atop the previously existing coffin before reburial. Upon closer examination, the charred, badly decomposed remains recovered by the SPD forensic team proved to be that of a large, overweight elderly male of Eastern European descent with severe arthritis and late stage lung cancer wearing a dress, heels, sequined trifocal harlequin glasses and a bedazzled hernia truss. A numerical tattoo on one forearm indicated that the body was that of Holocaust survivor (name withheld at the request of the surviving family members).

Numerous cigarette butts were found littering the nearby ground along with an empty Manischewitz bottle and a broken shovel.

After probate and being declared a total insurance loss, the remains of _The Grand Rialto_ were bulldozed flat and replaced by a _Dollar General_ store by after the property's sale by (name withheld at the request of the surviving family members)'s nearest heirs, the (name withheld at the request of the surviving family members) of Chicago, IL.

Three years after the fall of Sunnydale, Willow Rosenberg, living with her wife in Paris, France, received two well-worn envelopes postmarked by the defunct Sunnydale, CA post office. One contained an undisclosed amount of cash wrapped in an old movie popcorn bag with Spike's name on it in fountain pen, the other the deed to the now non-existent plot of land where _The Grand Rialto_ once stood. Rather than pursue the legal ownership of the non-existent property it outlined, she had the document framed. It now hangs in a place of honor over the bidet in her Paris apartment. The money languishes in her bedside table, forgotten and the home of mice.

Jacob Raus's supervisor, Bob, when Raus failed to report to his office for three consecutive days, shrugged all fifteen of it's shoulders and promoted the surviving occupant of the next cubicle, Ralph Q. Fantod, formerly of Camden, NJ, with an accompanying doubling of salary, an office with a window overlooking a dumpster, and a new company car.

Charlotte (Charlie) Dunrel, daughter of Mr. Henry Dunrel one of the founding members of FazCorp, after a lengthy legal battle, gained full control of The FazCorp Entertainment Group.

Or did she?

Spike never did get paid for his five nights at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzaria. However, he went on to have a lot more adventures, most of them ill-advised and quite emotionally painful – which is what happens when one follow the contents of one's BVD's and not that of one's skull.

Buffy Summers, not long after walking past the remains of _The Grand Rialto_ … Aw, hell, you already know what happened so why are we wasting your time?

Anyway, should you be interested, there is a sequal to this story, "Midnight Run" - where Buffy gets more involved, and Spike still doesn't get paid, though considering the state of his mind, I doubt he really cares.


End file.
